Comment by peddling-brink
3 years ago
I disagree. This is only about value extraction.
Let's walk down this slippery slope for a bit.
It's 8am, your alarm clock doesn't wake you up. You've run out of alarm credits again. They're cheap, but you have to refill them every month because the refill site wants to show you ads first.
You wake up late at 9:15, you're glad for the extra rest, but you won't make as much money today because you will get in late. On the other hand, you avoided the worst of the surge pricing for your shower.
You're finally ready to leave. You order your autonomous taxi and are given a choice of which navigation engine to use. You don't pay for UberPremium, so it's an extra $5 to unlock the Waze Ultra traffic avoidance system for the ride. Yesterday you chanced it with the free nav, and got stuck in traffic for an extra hour.
On the ride you pull out your laptop and connect to the in-car wifi. Within a couple minutes your free DNS requests are used up. You can either watch an ad to continue, or buy more dnscredits. It's only $5 for a thousand more credits, that should last you through Thursday.
Ha! Strong Libertarian Police Department [1] vibes.
Ironically, the New Yorker website has an illegal-in-the-EU cookies modal, then a delay and a manufactured-urgency "flash sale!" pop-up that turns into a "you're on your last article" banner.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
In this example the alarm clock was free, the taxi was cheaper if you didn’t care how fast you got there, and yes, most people pay a subscription for mobile data already
Things that are not free.
- My time. - My cognitive load.
The above sounds like a nightmare to me, but you do you.