cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607
This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.
We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.
But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.
I don’t want to sound like a pessimist but the Internet has never been the open grass field that the OP paint. Everytime you connect to the Internet, you’re connecting to a server that some entity is providing, through a connection that another entity has set up. Even this Lemmy instance is paid by somebody’s pocket. Servers and network infrastructure have always represented cost to providers. Maybe in times of olde when AOL and others offered services attached to their core service, we had services that were directly paid by the fee we paid for the connection. The owner of this Lemmy instance don’t see a dime of what you pay you ISP.
I know this is not at the core of this discussion, but if content is something that entities find valuable and somehow, the owner of this instance can directly receive monetary incentive from me to keep posting these inadequate long texts, by all means, I’m happy to be part of training data. I type this while I’m bored as hell and need my upvote-provided dopamine hit. I will be the grass on the field.
I think you make some valid points about server and network ownership but I think the mid to late 2000s had an interesting blend of corporate and personal internet spaces. Yes there were some leviathans MySpace and Facebook, but a lot of the places that had relevancy were forums, portals or imageboards. Hell, YTMND was an early example of a individual hosting and building a massive site out of complete nonsense. That landscape has certainly changed significantly since.