The Scourge Of Google

My ISP seems to levy this “charge” of $80US to me. They claim that failing to make good on this “charge” means I won’t have any internets anymore. They even have the nerve to repeat these shenanigans every month!

I’m pretty sure I’m already paying for internet content.

These days though, a lot of people sure seem to think I should be paying twice, three times, nay – as many times as necessary to drain my bank account! – in order to access “content”, which my inner economist would, rather generously I might add, classify as a luxury item.

In a sense, your last paragraph places the blame for the dominance of Google’s ads squarely at the feet of us cheapskate internet lowlifes who are not routinely engaging in the purchase of luxury goods, without regard as to what benefit would actually be derived from that purchase. Here I present an alternative hypothesis.

Most “content” is not going to make my life significantly better, nor offer me anything that I couldn’t get somewhere else for free or couldn’t do without entirely. So the issue isn’t that I’m too cheap to pay for content – see my first paragraph. The issue is that, above and beyond my internet service charge, there is so very little worth paying for.

A simple cost/benefit analysis reduces the problem to one of economics. And I like those problems, because it asks people to consider the concept which has the most direct bearing on their quality of life – money. This brings a certain clarity to an otherwise murky issue.

Now, Goole ads is far from perfect.

It is impossible to be a behemoth of an organisation like Google and not have the dexterity of an ogre squashed underneath 3 dead trolls. The ad situation you describe is a consequence of this reality. Organisations this big don’t use fine-tipped paint brushes, they dump truckloads of paint on the canvas and hope enough of it comes out alright. If enough of it doesn’t, they’ll change it.

Perhaps it is time for Richard to engage in his own cost/benefit analysis with respect to having the ads.

@Tremayne
You’re splitting hairs, really. Internet access by itself is useless unless there is something you can do with it. I don’t pay for internet access, I pay for what I can do with it – much of which involves content on the web.

Now, I’m well aware that web page publishers don’t get remunerated from my internet content payment to my ISP. Clearly, I am not sufficiently monetized yet!

That’s hardly my problem though. From my end, I’m already paying a fair chunk of coin to see these internets in all their glory. There’d need to be an awfully compelling reason for me to hand over MORE ontop of that.

(Sites which offer realtime stock data feeds are the only example I can think of where the site fee may be worthwhile, and that’s probably because you’d use it to make even more money than you’re spending.)

And no, I don’t believe you COULD successfully argue for a levy on ISPs to be paid out to web pages based on traffic. If you’re aware of net neutrality issues, you’ll know that some are trying nonetheless!

@Tremayne
Your point is well taken that if sites prove financially unviable and I am unwilling to support them that they will go away. I don’t see this as a bad thing, I see it merely as a thinning of the herd. Afterall, if I was unwilling to support a site financially, that implicitly means I didn’t care if it went away. I mean, I might be diappointed or think ‘gee, that’s a shame’ – but not enough to put my money where my mouth was.
I was sad when Lum the Mad ceased to exist. Life went on though. I had plenty of other alternatives with which to use my internets effectively.
@The Claw
Pants. I like it. I’ve struggled to find a way to directly refute what you’re saying, since in some weird way, it makes sense. I’m going to have to fall back to economics to save this debate.

The purchase of pants is a precondition to venturing outside in most places. So the pants are your outdoors access fee. Once you are outdoors, you are not compelled to enter any paid establishment.

Pants allow you to do so much more than go to the cinema. Pants allow you to visit many places which are free – down by the harbour, the beach, maybe up in the mountains at a lookout – or just a stroll down the street to the local park. In fact, there are likely thousands times more free places you could go with your pants than there are places which require paid entry.

Suppose the cost of pants rises. Perhaps a rapper gets elected president, and the first law he introduces is that everyone must wear gold-lined diamond-studded parachute pants 20 sizes too big for the wearer.

Suddenly, we’d be faced with a situation where we have much less disposable income, and are therefore much less willing to spend it on luxuries such as cinemas. If I had to pay $10,000 to leave the house, I’d be expecting an awful lot to be provided to me in compensation – or I’ll choose instead to stay at home and forgo the pants.

Now for the economics. You asked, “Why should I have to pay money to go to the cinema?” And the answer is: you don’t *have* to pay money to go to the cinema. You *choose* to pay for only two reasons:

1. They ask you to pay
2. You believe the cost is commensurate with the entertainment value of paying

Your outdoors access pass – your pants – were insufficient to grant you access to the cinema, because the cinema has imposed point #1 on you. That is their choice. This leaves you with a choice of whether or not you wish to pay an additional charge, which is where point #2 comes in.

Note that I haven’t mentioned anything about *the cinema’s* costs. Consumers do not care about the cinema’s costs – according to economic theory. I don’t care if it costs them $300 billion per year in hiring film reel swappers. I’m not going to pay $40,000 for a movie ticket to help them meet their costs.

The implication of your argument is that I should pay to go to the cinema because it costs money to run a cinema, despite having already paid for my pants. Ergo, I should pay for websites because it costs money to host a website, despite having paid for my internet connection. As pointed out in the previous paragraph, this costs-based argument is irrelevant to consumer purchasing decisions.

Furthermore, this argument doesn’t hold water because I have nigh infinite free alternatives to visiting the cinema. Having already paid for my pants / internet connection, I am going to be less likely to pay additional money for other services, as a simple consequence of the fact that I now have less disposable income. So, the services which are attempting to capture what’s left of my disposable income need to be of higher quality than usual, due to the access fee I have paid.

On the web, my argument is simply this: there are basically zero websites that would meet the criteria of being high enough quality to pay for *on top of* my access fee.

If the internet were free and I could sign up to various sites that I liked for a fee, I’d pick my favourite sites and do that happily. I only visit 7 or 8 sites on a regular basis. However, since I pay a large sum of money every month to get internet access, I am no longer willing to do this. I have scarce resources, resources which are made scarcer by my access fee, which means I need to more frugally preserve what is left.

If everyone’s pants cost $10,000, we would be right in asking “why should I have to pay money to go to the cinema?”