There's a clearly obvious paygate for content access: Internet service providers, whether broadband or mobile.
These provide services to areas which themselves can be generally ranked in terms of wealth, leading to the opportunity for a progressive, unmetered, universal payment mechanism. In this system, various publishers (and notably local news and information sources) would be afforded compensation or revenue, and subscribers would have access to any available information.
Remote-but-locally-focused providers (e.g., the small-town paper across the state, or the country, or in another continent) would be compensated principally through their local service providers (with some balancing within states having widely-varying economic distributions, e.g., NYC / upstate New York, Chicago / downstate Illinois, coastal / inland California, etc.
National / general-interest content (national or international news, e.g.) might receive a share of local/regional revenues, say, for national TV and radio broadcast news organisations, nationally-distributed newspapers (WSJ, NYT, WaPo in the US as examples), and book and magazine publishers. (Other countries and regions could make similar allocations.)
Much of this would offset online advertising, which costs a typical household of four on the order of $1,800/year within North America and EU ($455 billion projected 2021 spend, ~1 billion population). This is what people *are already paying for "free" online content. Direct content spend is on the order of $100/person, or 1/4 the cost of advertising. Distributed across all households (pro-rated by wealth as noted), on an all-you-can-eat basis, would be a remarkable game-changer.
These provide services to areas which themselves can be generally ranked in terms of wealth, leading to the opportunity for a progressive, unmetered, universal payment mechanism. In this system, various publishers (and notably local news and information sources) would be afforded compensation or revenue, and subscribers would have access to any available information.
Remote-but-locally-focused providers (e.g., the small-town paper across the state, or the country, or in another continent) would be compensated principally through their local service providers (with some balancing within states having widely-varying economic distributions, e.g., NYC / upstate New York, Chicago / downstate Illinois, coastal / inland California, etc.
National / general-interest content (national or international news, e.g.) might receive a share of local/regional revenues, say, for national TV and radio broadcast news organisations, nationally-distributed newspapers (WSJ, NYT, WaPo in the US as examples), and book and magazine publishers. (Other countries and regions could make similar allocations.)
Much of this would offset online advertising, which costs a typical household of four on the order of $1,800/year within North America and EU ($455 billion projected 2021 spend, ~1 billion population). This is what people *are already paying for "free" online content. Direct content spend is on the order of $100/person, or 1/4 the cost of advertising. Distributed across all households (pro-rated by wealth as noted), on an all-you-can-eat basis, would be a remarkable game-changer.
Earlier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27803591
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077674
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545446
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15683719