Oops, you're right! They claimed that Tim Berners-Lee stole their idea.
I agree that the lack of monetization was important to the development and that it would have been chaos as proposed, but will the current setup be sustainable forever in the world of AI?
We have projects like Ethereum that are specifically intended to merge payments and computing, and I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future, some kind of small access fee negotiated in the background without direct user involvement become a component of access. I wouldn't expect people to pay ISPs but rather some kind of token exchange to occur that would benefit both the network operators and the web hosts by verifying classes of users. Non-fungible token exchanges could be used as a kind of CATPCHA replacement by cryptographically verifying users anonymously with a third-party token holder as the intermediary.
For example, let's say Mullvad or some other VPN company purchased a small amount of verification tokens for its subscribers who pay them anonymously for an account. On the other side, let's say a government requires people to register through their ISP, and the ISP purchases the same tokens on behalf of the user, and then exchanges the tokens on behalf of the user. In either case, the person can stand behind a third party who both sends them the data they requested and exchanges the verification tokens, which the site operator could then exchange for reimbursement of their services to their hosting provider.
This is just a high-level idea of how we might get around the challenges of a web dominated by bots and AI, but I'm sure the reality of it will be more interesting.
I hate AI as much as any reasonable person should, but I don't think money is a viable filter when governments and corporations will just throw as much money legislation and infrastructure at it as needed to render it irrelevant. They can just budget it in, or pass laws requiring privileged access.
Meanwhile as profit motives begin to dominate (as they inevitably would,) access to information and resources becomes more and more of a privilege than a right, and everything becomes more commercialized, faster.
I won't claim to have a better idea, though. The best solutions in my mind are simply not publishing anything to the web and letting AI choke on its own vomit, or poisoning anything you do publish, somehow.
I agree that the lack of monetization was important to the development and that it would have been chaos as proposed, but will the current setup be sustainable forever in the world of AI?
We have projects like Ethereum that are specifically intended to merge payments and computing, and I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future, some kind of small access fee negotiated in the background without direct user involvement become a component of access. I wouldn't expect people to pay ISPs but rather some kind of token exchange to occur that would benefit both the network operators and the web hosts by verifying classes of users. Non-fungible token exchanges could be used as a kind of CATPCHA replacement by cryptographically verifying users anonymously with a third-party token holder as the intermediary.
For example, let's say Mullvad or some other VPN company purchased a small amount of verification tokens for its subscribers who pay them anonymously for an account. On the other side, let's say a government requires people to register through their ISP, and the ISP purchases the same tokens on behalf of the user, and then exchanges the tokens on behalf of the user. In either case, the person can stand behind a third party who both sends them the data they requested and exchanges the verification tokens, which the site operator could then exchange for reimbursement of their services to their hosting provider.
This is just a high-level idea of how we might get around the challenges of a web dominated by bots and AI, but I'm sure the reality of it will be more interesting.