Ask HN: Would you fund a world-wide-web without tracking? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you fund a world-wide-web without tracking?

15 pointsThePhysicist22 comments

So, I'm working on a new idea to build a "friendly neighborhood" of the world wide web where websites respect the privacy of visitors and do not track them. Technologically I already know how to approach this, but I'm wondering about the funding model.

I'm thinking about building a community where people donate money and we distribute that among the website publishers, following a model similar to Humble-Bundle where supporters can decide how much money should go to the publishers and how much should go to us (so that we can fund our work).

Would you support something like that? I think even with a small community we could quickly help some folks that run great niche websites to switch to a more privacy-friendly funding model.

View on HN

Users already pay for internet access. Why pay again?

The problem is not really money but rather the distribution of funds. A portion of the internet access fee needs to be set aside for public access web sites. Commercial web sites are on their own. To qualify for a portion of the proceeds, there will have to be some sort of application and approval process. Distribution to be based on traffic level above a specified minimum. Engaging in any sort of user tracking would be a disqualifier.

Lots of details here to be worked out but this is the most logical approach that will have a reasonable chance of working IMO.

I wouldn't make it too dependent on traffic level or at least put upper and lower boundaries on it. This is necessary for anything that qualifies as infrastructure in my opinion. Otherwise you would completely kill any site for local content and it would disincentivise growth as an end in itself.

Not really on topic but anything like that for art would be neat as well.

Interesting thought! Seems like a great idea to let people pay for privacy-friendly Internet like they pay for green electricity today, though the details are a bit different of course.

The first rule of business, "Always make it as easy as possible for customers to pay".

This explains a lot of Amazon's success.

My proposal requires no additional effort from the user which is why it has a good chance to succeed.

I like the intention but I suspect it will be abused. What methods are you going to use to enforce not tracking? Will each business have to put up a large bond and have a binding contract tied to third party audits that verify they are not tracking? When a company is found to violate your terms will they give back all the funds they received plus a large percentage? Do they lose their domains for a year? Is this operating on an honor system? What incentives do a company have to participate in this?

Thanks! There are several techniques that can be combined to ensure no tracking takes place (not ready to share all the details yet), so technologically it's feasible. Forcing publishers to give back funds would probably be difficult, but it would be possible to halt paying out of new funds for websites that violate the terms.

In general the idea is to take a cooperative approach though, publishers need a strong monetary incentive to not track users. I'm thinking about other ways to help publishers monetize websites in a privacy-friendly way, advertisements (without tracking of specific users and without retargeting etc.) would be another option but I'd prefer to find different solution. I know that this won't work for every publisher, but we need to start somewhere.

I remember reading about micropayments in the 1990's. I thought "this is inevitable." It wasn't then.

In the fat decade I've been on HN, I've seen micropayment a few times each year. Because people think it is inevitable.

I've realized that the simple problem is accounting overhead. There are fixed costs to processing a payment. Most of them are potentially very small. But some are not. Like chargebacks. And lawsuits (because it's money).

Assuming they are evenly distributed independent of transaction size -- a dubious assumption because if transactions are small it takes more transactions to make money from fraud -- the percentage of revenue that goes into soft overhead of chargebacks and lawsuits is larger.

There's a general principle here.

There's more money in doing business with people who have lots of money. VRBO has lots of money for ads. You can make more money doing business with them than trying to get money from people bothered by ads.

Good luck.

I suspect the vast majority of people who say yes will change their tune when you ask them to take out their wallets. The second issue you’ll run in to is paying publishers. It will be hard to convince that many publishers to sign up and receive the funds, believe it or not.

I think a possibly more successful route would be to start with a niche cohort of people who like some set of niche websites that may not monetize well via ads but still have loyal readership/user base. Ideally sites that generate good, unique content on a regular basis —- content their readership loves. In this way you will find it easier to negotiate/pay the site owners and it will come with a built in audience that is likelier to pay.

In Switzerland, public radio & TV are funded by a tax every household pays, whether you have a TV/radio or not (note that the websites of public TV & radio use quite some trackers... but are ad free; the TV is NOT ad free though). I would imagine that something similar for publicly relevant web sites would make (at least some) sense... But there would be to have legally enforced safeguards against abuses (e.g. getting financed this way and nevertheless tracking users/selling their data)

Thanks for that idea! The same thing exists in Germany and if there was a way to draw from that money it would be awesome of course, but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Frequently abused in countries like Hungary to push state propaganda.

Idea is nice in theory but not bulletproof.

The state of the world where a comedy series, Silicon Valley on HBO really is the state of how a new Internet could form.

Thanks, I'll have too look that up!

Honestly nah. Not likely.

My site is already ad free and invasive tracking free so I have no real reason to join and I don't believe anyone donates money like that. Not in high enough numbers to be worth noticing anyway. You might get the odd nerd that's like "hmmmm well acktuallllly, I .." but they've donated like a fiver across the year

I wouldn't sign up as a user either if I'm honest. I'd just go read some other blog if it was paywalled and wouldn't notice a donate link if it wasn't

I do like the idea as an idea, I just don't think the world will do anything with it. This idea plus a better funding model than donations and we're at a maybe but even then I dunno if I could be arsed. That sounds like a lot of squeeze for minimal juice

Thanks for that honest feedback! I know that most people probably wouldn't pay for that, though it seems that micro-donations in the style of Patreon or Github Sponsorships are on the rise, so maybe that could work in the privacy space too.

No problem! Please never don't take my opinion as damnation or anything! I'm not the target market for most things, this could be one of them

If I were in your position I might get started by looking into the web3 blockchain hype. Built in superfan audience and might be niche enough to get you started ("the blogging platform of Web 3.0!" or something). I'd also look at web-1.0 webrings to find any pitfalls and shortcuts there, structurally your idea sounds similar to that plus payments

You might be positioned nicely there at a hunch, but I don't know any more about it other than it exists! :)

However things unfold, best of luck to this and any future projects!

I just realised I wrote "please never don't" there

Substitute with "please don't" or "please never", I appear to have combined the two and double negative'd myself.

I'm not paying websites to not track me, id happily avoid those that do track me. Same difference.

it would have to sustain itself somehow

Doesn't Porn pay for the web?

Nope. The internet works because of advertising.

The World Wide Web doesn't need funding. What it needs is for people to understand that if you don't have a day job you don't belong on the Web. Breaking news doesn't belong on the web; archives do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com