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Comment by mizay7 | Hacker News Reader

Agree in principle. But in practice, what is the alternative business model you propose?

Also, changing the business model away from surveillance capitalism, in my eyes, is not a first step but a massive and complicated (though perhaps very necessary) end goal.

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Yeah I didn't mean to imply this first step would be easy or result in the survival of these companies. To me it probably looks like the government stepping in, either threatening legislation or imposing it immediately that forces companies to transition off these business models if they meet some criteria which defines them as a public forum of a certain scale. (Of course this is full of potential negative unintended consequences, like cementing their dominance, so my guess is things will end up worse before they get better if this happens.)

Hopefully companies do this on their own accord before we get there. A model where a subset of users pay for the services would be a healthier model. This would likely result in a major loss of market cap and head count for these companies, but I'd imagine it would be sustainable in terms of keeping the services available and would enable these companies to charter a positive future for their users without having a conflict of interest.

I propose a betting market or a prediction market in my other post here.

I'm also a fan of paying for services. I pay for Fastmail instead of Gmail - am happy with that. $10 per year.

What is the profit made per real user of Google?

I'd pay about $50 per year for a search engine that was entirely aligned with myself. I suspect that is higher than what is made by surveillance.

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