Do you mean 0.9 cents or 0.9 dollars (90 cents)? One is equivalent to a tenth of a Netflix subscription, the other a thousandth. If you're talking about the higher amount, I misunderstood you.
But why doesn't it "just work"? Why isn't the internet more simple? It comes down to two things: this way is more profitable, and stuff is hard.
I don't believe that these companies have a personal data fetish. They have a money fetish. If they believed they could make more money by charging every user a flat rate and keeping their data secret, they'd do it. And I'm pretty sure they're right. If simple pricing and privacy was the better option, it would have won by now. There is no shortage of people who want to try a new twist on things in the tech world.
As for the second item, the hardness. Indexing data is hard. There isn't enough value for every given website to do it. So, Google does the work for them and also extracts the value.
You want a video site to charge your ISP. So they'll have to integrate with every ISP? That's quite a task. Maybe a company will come in and help with that. They'll integrate with every ISP and then allow every movie streamer to use them as a service. And perhaps to simplify things, they'll charge the thing you use to pay your ISP bill (credit card) instead of adding to the bill. Cut out a middle man. Maybe they'll even let you use any credit card you choose and hide them from the merchants you're purchasing from. Of course, this is a good idea, so they'll have competition.
Oh shit. Now you have all those payment processing companies you're tired of. It's hard.
Meant 0.90 cents.
"Why isn't the internet more simple?"
I guess it's the same reason why we don't use modularity in operating systems and applications. We have gotten used to how things have been done until now.
Recommend reading this article since this ideas have been in my head for some time.
"Indexing data is hard. There isn't enough value for every given website to do it."
Well a lot of websites have their own search feature and a modular FOSS search engine wouldn't be out of the question. The database would need to figure out what is the context of the content and then tag those contents.
The data could be feed to a repository or pass around different computers if we would use a decentralized protocol.
Given the modular nature of the system you could be hooked to more than one repository and your application would only need to figure out if the data feed is a duplicate and sort the content by metadata.
I'm curious to what would the web look like if a large numbers of websites decided that they don't want Google. A verification system would also be need to verify that no one website tempers with it's data in order to rank higher in the results.
Then again this would be a very modular experience so you would have a lot of choices regarding verification systems,wall crawlers, database repositories.
True, the last part is true, that you would have more choices but isn't that what we want? Also i'm not saying that I wouldn't want Paypal and Gwallet to not exist just saying that there is a lot of interesting things out there I would wish to see happen.
I'm not the previous poster, but the ISP charging thingy could probably be done with a standard protocol, a bit like OAuth. The site would emit a payment request, then redirect to the ISP (you could have a generic URL that each ISP would redirect to their own payment system) that would sign it and redirect back. Then the sites could take those signed tokens and charge the ISP in a lump sum.
Still, the ISPs would definitively charge something for the service, so it's unclear if it would actually be cheaper.
But why doesn't it "just work"? Why isn't the internet more simple? It comes down to two things: this way is more profitable, and stuff is hard.
I don't believe that these companies have a personal data fetish. They have a money fetish. If they believed they could make more money by charging every user a flat rate and keeping their data secret, they'd do it. And I'm pretty sure they're right. If simple pricing and privacy was the better option, it would have won by now. There is no shortage of people who want to try a new twist on things in the tech world.
As for the second item, the hardness. Indexing data is hard. There isn't enough value for every given website to do it. So, Google does the work for them and also extracts the value.
You want a video site to charge your ISP. So they'll have to integrate with every ISP? That's quite a task. Maybe a company will come in and help with that. They'll integrate with every ISP and then allow every movie streamer to use them as a service. And perhaps to simplify things, they'll charge the thing you use to pay your ISP bill (credit card) instead of adding to the bill. Cut out a middle man. Maybe they'll even let you use any credit card you choose and hide them from the merchants you're purchasing from. Of course, this is a good idea, so they'll have competition.
Oh shit. Now you have all those payment processing companies you're tired of. It's hard.