What would you pay for an "Everything Included" internet service?

What, like access to all the paid for porn sites? How would this work?

 

I don't know but I imagine it would be HARD

 

Try more along the lines of impossible.

And OP, the price for such a service would be well over $45. Just consider some of the things on the internet that cost up to several hundred dollars...then consider how many hundreds of thousands of those things there are. Yeah.

 

or thousands

 

And who would participate from a vendor POV? These are competitors, remember. This is of course ignoring collusion and price-fixing restrictions. Also, most internet users couldn't care less about most of the for-fee sites.

"The internet" isn't just a bunch of services that can be bundled and rammed down our throats like cable (and I'd prefer if that were completely unbundled as well). It's been tried, and it's called AOL. The entire point of an ISP vs. a Content Provider is that CP's, well, suck in general. Broad but shallow, and subject to a single entity's idea of what content I should have. No, thank you.

I've got the bandwidth I pay for, and everything I access with it is already "free." I don't need subscription sites.

 

Yeah, managing all the ins and outs would be a nightmare.

 

Well - since SDSL didn't work out for me, these days I pay ~£9,000 a year just for reliable Internet access from home - at the staggering speed of a whole 4MBits/sec up and down.

The 'installed by untrained hyenas' cable line which I use for 'real home' use - and as a backup to the main connection - is (sometimes, and a lot less frequently than it should be) faster downline, but obviously it hasn't got the same level of reliability (or upline speed).

I suppose it depends on not just what you can access, but how you access it. What I want is a link with 4-hour fix, ISDN backup and an SLA for £20/month

 

Am I really the only person to read this as a joke? Slackers.



Edit: I guess not. Seems dmr727 picked up on it too.

 

The only thing I pay for right now on the internet is stuff I buy -- I don't think I pay for access to anything right now, although I access non-free services my workplace pays for (e.g. scientific journals).

Also what is the line between paying for a service and buying a product? Everything on the internet being bundled in the cost presumably does not mean I could order a new Macbook Pro and have it be free. But would it mean that I could purchase unlimited iTunes songs and videos for free? Or what about unlimited use of a subscription service like Rhapsody, if any of them are still in business?

I'm not completely opposed to some kind of use tax model for the internet, where money is collected by ISPs and fed back to the sites their customers use, but I think the reality is still that (1) few people pay for a lot of internet services for which this kind of model could work anyways, and (2) most people right now pay a significant portion of their income already for telecommunication / information services, between paying for cable or satellite television service, a landline phone (if they have one), a cellular phone (and often SMS and data services for that), and an internet connection.

If, tomorrow, people were asked to pay $100 more per month to use the internet, you'd find a lot of drop off in usage simply because people cannot afford using additional disposable income on buying information services....

 

As well as porn there is all the academic stuff. That I can't imagine is cheap.