How the Internet should work

Here's how the Internet could and should be operating this very day in your very own home:

1. A "two cents worth" business model.

2. A complete fiber-optic "hub and spoke" communications network.

Both of these models were being openly discussed in 1995, 17 years ago, by no less an authority than an MIT professor of media technology. His name is Nicholas Negroponte, and the two models were presented in his book, "Being Digital" (Knopf, 1995).

The "two cents worth" business model has a user paying two cents per visit to a Website. If you are reading this page right now, a PayPal-like mechanism inside the Internet would collect two cents from your account, and deposit it into my account.

For his example, Negroponte used a New York Times reporter. "If one two-hundredths of the 1995 Internet population were to subscribe to this idea," he said, and the Times reporter wrote 100 stories a year, he would earn one million dollars a year.

I don't know what the Internet population number is 17 years later, but I know that, using the two cents worth model, neither the reporter nor the Times would be in any financial difficulty. No doubt the Times would split with the reporter 75-25, meaning $250,000 annually (based on the 1995 numbers) for the reporter and $750,000 for the paper.

As for the reader (the user), 1,000 visits to Websites per month would cost $20.

Fiber was not new or untested in 1995, but it was certainly novel, because it could move 1,000 billion bits of data per second. "Transferring data at that speed," Negroponte said, "a fiber can deliver a million channels of television concurrently . . . I am talking of a single fiber, so if you want more, you just make more. It is, after all, just sand."

Phone companies were already using fiber to replace the old copper phone lines, as they wore out, but they weren't motivated to accelerate fiber expansion because fiber was way too powerful for regular old phone service. The phone companies saw the opportunity, though, and petitioned the FCC in 1983 to enter the entertainment and information industry. The petition was denied, and then softened in 1994. But 10 years of fiber expansion had been lost.

And so fiber is still in the future. A company called "Google Fiber" has begun trials in selected cities, the first being Kansas City. If fiber had been in place by 2000, with time enough to influence Internet entertainment and information business development, right now you could log off from here and get whatever entertainment and information you wanted, as those options are described on the Google Fiber home page.

That is how the Internet could and should be operating, this very day in your very own home. The cable companies are shaking in their boots. Yay! It just comes way too late.