yeah, as I said, they weren't entirely unsuccessful....which also means they were mostly unsuccessful, alas.
This does, however, mean that the opportunity still exists for anybody who want to try it.
The problem is there's just too much of a "bump" in inconvenience going from charging nothing to charging even fractions of a cent. In fact, the amount of pain necessary (dealing with banks, regulators, taxes, 50 individual states with different sales tax, not to mention every country earth, etc) is pretty much the same whether you are charging a thousandth of a cent or a thousand dollars.
What can't be done individually, retail, can sometimes be done collectively, wholesale. The government could just collect a tax-per-megabyte of data sucked from the web, and distribute the receipts according to how much each provider of that data sent the data. Or it could be a progressive tax, just factored into your income tax.
Even though that could be implemented with very low marginal overhead (we already have an IRS, which is already set up to take money from people, and distribute money to people as refunds), the political difficulties in such a scheme are obvious.
This leaves either ads (which incentivizes "news" sources to print florid opinions instead of fact) or pay for no adds (like YouTube premium) which incentiizes spamming so many adds that the users will pay to stop the pain.
But yeah, the need is still out there. Someday some financial genius will figure out a way to do it and will be as rich as Rockafellers.
This does, however, mean that the opportunity still exists for anybody who want to try it.
The problem is there's just too much of a "bump" in inconvenience going from charging nothing to charging even fractions of a cent. In fact, the amount of pain necessary (dealing with banks, regulators, taxes, 50 individual states with different sales tax, not to mention every country earth, etc) is pretty much the same whether you are charging a thousandth of a cent or a thousand dollars.
What can't be done individually, retail, can sometimes be done collectively, wholesale. The government could just collect a tax-per-megabyte of data sucked from the web, and distribute the receipts according to how much each provider of that data sent the data. Or it could be a progressive tax, just factored into your income tax.
Even though that could be implemented with very low marginal overhead (we already have an IRS, which is already set up to take money from people, and distribute money to people as refunds), the political difficulties in such a scheme are obvious.
This leaves either ads (which incentivizes "news" sources to print florid opinions instead of fact) or pay for no adds (like YouTube premium) which incentiizes spamming so many adds that the users will pay to stop the pain.
But yeah, the need is still out there. Someday some financial genius will figure out a way to do it and will be as rich as Rockafellers.