What would the world be like now if more online services/platforms had started charging early on?

[Cloo]

I mean, putting aside how realistic that really was before people really understood the potential. But in the early days of www, there was this idealism that it should all be free and we would form autonomous, progressive cultures via the internet and so on. If people had been able to start charging for, say, social media in the early 2010s and somehow it had caught on, what would have happened?

I guess we wouldn't have mass social media, fewer kids would be online if everything charged. There'd be less political interference by state actors, but at the same time you wouldn't have got Me Too and BLM. Newspapers would have all started charging and would have had more of a stranglehold on the media narrative.

 

[PTK]

I mean, putting aside how realistic that really was before people really understood the potential. But in the early days of www, there was this idealism that it should all be free and we would form autonomous, progressive cultures via the internet and so on. If people had been able to start charging for, say, social media in the early 2010s and somehow it had caught on, what would have happened?

I guess we wouldn't have mass social media, fewer kids would be online if everything charged. There'd be less political interference by state actors, but at the same time you wouldn't have got Me Too and BLM. Newspapers would have all started charging and would have had more of a stranglehold on the media narrative.

I am sure that there would have been Black Lives Matter.