When you pay your water bill, you aren’t just paying for the upkeep of the pipes that brought the water to your house – you’re also paying for the production of that water. The internet should be no different.
Besides paying a fixed monthly cost to your ISP for the physical connection, there should be a tiny monetary amount – a fraction of a cent – attached to each HTTP request you make, that can go towards covering server costs. Currently sites have no choice but to pay for their upkeep with advertising. Replacing this with direct payments would drastically curtail the data broker and surveillance industry that currently lives off of it.
How server costs would be measured, and whether sites would be allowed to charge a premium on top of that (eliminating paywalls, but also making web browsing a much more price-weary activity) is up for debate.
But currently using the internet is like paying for a car, without paying road tax.
So, you’re CDN example is completely off-base. CDNs are complicated companies, to be sure, but the endpoint of a CDN is the closest thing to a potato possible. That’s why CDNs exist. They are trying to colocate as much data as possible in the cheapest hardware possible in as many locations as possible to drive the cost of serving an HTTP request down as low as possible.
You’re correct that the cost of running a website is not in the network, much like the cost of your home computer is not in the Internet service (it’s in your computer), but that’s not the point.
The point is that I am paying for my network and also the service is paying for their network.
Now, normally we can frame this as paying for infrastructure. I am paying to subsidize the infrastructure that brings my traffic to the backbone and the service is paying for the infrastructure that brings them to the backbone.
And we can leave it at that and it’s fair. As soon as a network provider charges for volume, like mobile data caps, we’re in a double-dip scenario. Now I am paying for the bits transiting the network from backbone and the provider is also paying for those same bits transiting the network to backbone.
I agree with most points but IMO CDNs are not just a potato, it is a ton of potatoes all easing the load on your server. The individual endpoint is not much but one endpoint does not a CDN make. You’d need the network to be able to lower the load on the server significantly (depending on the data type and caching method of course, but generally I’d say this is true).
Also agree with data caps in the current age. In the early mobile internet transfer was expensive but now it isn’t. I cannot put words on how grateful I am for being able to have no data caps on 1Gig (up to 2.5Gig with same carrier, just in a location where they have upgraded the equipment) as well as no data caps on 4G/5G mobile.
From the perspective of the provider yes it’s millions of potatoes. But from the perspective of the consumer, it’s one potato. Their HTTP request is served by the dumbest, cheapest piece of equipment feasible. The fact that there is a complex network of millions of them only means that each HTTP request made is guaranteed to be served by the closest potato.