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.
It would be a privacy nightmare, of course. Either we would all have to install monitoring software on our devices, or we would have to allow ISPs to break HTTPS.
I believe ISPs can already see the domain names you visit though, which would be enough data even for what I proposed
Multiple HTTP requests can be performed over a single connection, and not all connections are for HTTP requests in the first place. The only way to know that an HTTP request is being made (or how many) is to actually see the requests.