I would agree with you that it was a very positive thing when all those bloated-with-capital instant corporations started collapsing of their own elephantiasis (as painful as it's been for me personally). The Internet is best at one-to-one connections, and the kind of multiway connections we experience here. It most definitely is not a broadcast medium, and not a business that benefits much at all from economies of scale nor from centralisation.

That said, I have to agree with Dan's reaction in thinking of your model of self-published, small sites, as a "hobby". The fact that it's so easy for any individual to express him/herself through the Net is perhaps its most important--one might say, subversive--aspect; but it's limited by the resources of a single individual.

I pay to use the internet to view other people's sites.



Everything gets paid for, nobody gets rich, and the Net continues...



I'm afraid you're dead wrong, Nick. The sites you visit do not receive one penny of the money you pay to your Internet service provider. Your Net service is a common carrier, no different from your phone service. When you call a business on the phone and order something, say takeout from a restaurant, you still have to pay the business for what you get. The food's not included in your phone bill, is it?

It's the lack of a mechanism for direct transactions like that that has created the dependence on advertising, in which a third party foots the bill, and inevitably calls the shots as to what information is and is not presented on the Web. That, in turn, has given big corporations horrendous power over the Net.

When I talk about mechanisms for people to pay directly for what they get on the Net, I'm challenging the corporate hegemony over the Net. I want people to dictate what the Net should be and become, and not sit passively on the couch and accept whatever pablum the corporations want them to have...pablum whose agenda is to sell consumer products, not enlighten or inform or in any way benefit the people who receive the information.

If there are only hobbyist Davids and corporate Goliaths on the Net, the corporations will dominate and control the Net. True freedom and widespread participation can come only from a full spectrum of interactions, from "free" at the extremes of Davids and Goliaths, through all sorts of smaller-scale interactions that involve the freely-given financial cooperation of smaller numbers of people. HabitableZone might, for example, be modeled as a cooperative, a non-profit that's not about anybody getting rich, but simply about a community working together to maintain its "commons". There's a place for small businesses on the Net as an alternative to huge mass merchandisers, specialty businesses that make a modest profit in a global market filling a niche that could never have been economically viable on a local (physically-limited) scale.

That's an Internet that truly belongs to the people. Much more so than a binary hobbyist versus megacorporation Net...

--Robert