Now, In addition to that, those services will be a propietary "chunk" or large slice of the web, and you will be restricted to inside those areas and sites when you buy your package, with leaving and going to another corporate web costing like the difference in long distance now. Stay inside, it's "local", flat fee, insist on going outside your company's chunk of the web, you will be "roamoing" and charged by the minute or meg or something. think of it as you will be purchasing into some private humongous WAN. Private huge WANS that do everything from voice to surfing, movies, network tlevision type shows, to breaking news to chat to whatever, all on a single private WAN that you pay a flat fee for, maybe 99.99$ a month or something like that. You pay them, they pay the website creators, who work for the corporate WAN, or are allowed to put up content, because the corp thinks it's great, worthwhile to transfer around, worthwhile to offer to their customers.
Imagine-just ferinstance- AOL owning a large chunk of the web,-this is easy to imagine- and limiting people to that "chunk" for a flat fee, but incorporating all the other services at the same time. A whole lot of people would be quite content to completely stay inside that area of the web, it's still huge, tremendous amount of different things to see and do.
Speculation now is this is where microsoft itself is headed, a propietary chunk of the web, where you are forced not only to use their products to access it, but it's also required that content be created and served with their products, so their next step is to drop money into the pipes themselves at some point, and finish walling themselves off or in. A big walled city, but still 'the walls".
I think an arrangement like this is more probable, given the blurring of data transfer, and what it is, it's becoming 'the same thing" almost, instead of rigidly ONLY cable tv or ONLY satellite tv, or ONLY telephony or ONLY casual surfing or ONLY beeper/mesaging hither and yon--I see more package deals being offered, and the profits to be squeezed out there, with the content companies or individuals paying the bandwith transferring companies, a further melding of hosting service and bandwith selling. The bandwith transferring companies will have an incentive to charge "enough" to pay for what they host and transfer, plus make a profit, but not so much as to make people pick another package deal from internet WAN chunk dealer B, or C. It's in their best interest to allow good websites, and to disallow crappy websites, because they can then brag they have "the best internet", almost like pizza wars-"hey, our pizza has ten toppings and double cheese, the other guys only have single cheese". Look how much it's changed in just wireless phone lately.
The one glaringly obvious problem with penny a page is-what's a page! Really, what's a page? I guess a PDF page might come the closest to a standard that's out there now, but still, like, where's a size that any two people are going to agree on?
One other solution is distributed computing, everyone is a server and a client, this is the 'co-op" methiod of internetting, a la gneutella or napster, eliminate a ton of middlemen that way, drop the prices a lot.
There's still tons of empty pipe out there, not even being used, it's not bandwith, it's the concentrations required for the much smaller amounts of servers compared to clients, those are the expensive chokepoints now, not the big lines going every place, and the server-computers all have to be much more sophisticated and dedicated, got to have fuzzy dice and turbochargers and liquid nitrogen cooling and tons of blinking lights and arcane runic symbols so they cost more, they need flocks of full-time expensive IT guys hanging about "upgrading" and "patching" and engaging in OS flamewars on the company nickel at strange forums,heh, and who have to then have offices who then need buildings to put offices in, and etc,etc, etc, then they have to go to conventions and buy brand new stuff because the old stuff is 1 horsepower not big enough anymore, and on and on. There's the real expense of the internet. Hey, here's a thought-MOVE THE DANG INTERNET OUT OF SAN FRANCISO. it costs like a mint for everything there, any rweason why the bulk of the net has to be there? couldn't the internet price be cut in half by a diaspora out to flyiver country all over? i thoiought the net was so you could be anyplace and go anywhere electronicaly, so the main guys all pushing that idea all live in 6 counties in california, and artifficially up the prices of office space and living and 5 buck cups of coffee, and etc, when the sane exact stuff could be done over here in bubba ville for 50 cents? There's a thought right there..
Now the everyone is a server idea is cool, if the bulk of the net could be hosted where the idea came from, on peecees, then people who liked it allowed that page or whatever to also be hosted on whomever else liked it, and vicey versa, all over, spreading the bandwith hit out a lot more, un-choking the choke points, it would eliminate a lot of that, and billions in overhead. Obviously, it would never completely eliminate dedicated huge server farms for a lot of apps and businesses, but for the bulk of the casual web it would work pretty well, given that there was an agreement to actually distribute operating systems and software that was really secure and easy to use and not this nightmare crapola that's out there now, and a way to really have an address that worked, even on a dialup connection. .
Fun ideas, though. If I could be guaranteed ZERO ads, fast transfer, great content, that would be worth 40$ a month to me, I surf a lot. I'd pay more for high speed, talking about at rural dialup speed, so that would be double the 20 clams I pay now. That could work. As it is, I see zero ads, because I keep images and scripting turned OFF, ha!
Now if they do this penny a page deal,and it's the bigfat lie like cable TV turned out to be, no thankee. Just as many ads on cable as free over the air tv, and they lied about it bigtime back in the early 70's when it was being pushed, when they made their billions in esclusive local monopoly contracts, and they claimed back then that most of the content was going to be ad-free, with the profits made at the flat sign up rate. That morphed pretty quickly. if I have to pay a penny a page, plus it's the same old zillion stoopid ads, plus it's scripted and buggy and insecure as heck, no thanks, I'll stick with the way it is now, closer to e-anarchy.