Utopia (?): Pay per byte Internet model

Just a quick post, maybe I’ll expand it later. (2010-03-11)

With the recent proliferation of social networks (the latest buzzword is Buzz), RSS, file-sharing, I think the Internet will converge to a pay per byte model, where you would pay for data-bytes that you get from someone you “follow”, or receive “messages” from.

The telecoms would act as a mere mediators.

This would also help the regular Joe out there easily charge for the content he produces. Web sites wouldn’t get in the ridiculous situation where the more hits you have, the more *you* have to pay to the ISPs.

This would in turn remove adds from web “pages” (better yet: services) and help the spreading of Free/Open Source “content”, because every time you’d download something, you’d pay for it. No adds also means no bias towards some companies.