Occupy the Internet!

Welcome to the offices of "Occupy the Internet."

We are similar to the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, which protested Wall Street ripping off the little people and giving it to the rich people. Their battle cry was, "The 99 percent." Ours is, "Our 2 cents worth."

If we all got our 2 cents worth, the Internet would be a fabulously productive place. Instead, it's impoverished. Sooner or later, Internet businesses would have to start asking for handouts. Now it has happened. WikiPedia started asking last week:

“We are the small non-profit that runs the #5 website in the world. We have only 150 staff but serve 450 million users, and have costs like any other top site: servers, power, rent, programs, staff and legal help. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We take no government funds. We run on donations. If everyone reading this gave the price of a cup of coffee, our fundraiser would be done within an hour.”

You can donate to Wikipedia if you like, but the better solution is embedded right there in the plea, in boldface: “If everyone reading this gave the price of a cup of coffee, our fundraiser would be done within an hour.”

It’s called the multiplier effect. Everyone using Wikipedia is a lot of people – 450 million, according to Wikipedia – and if each donated the price of a cup of coffee, say $1, that’s $450 million, and you’d only be out a buck.

That's where Occupy the Internet comes in. We don't want WikiPedia to have to ask for handouts. Our goal is an Internet-wide system that would require users to pay to use WikiPedia, and every other Internet site, 2 cents for every visit. Every time 450 million users paid 2 cents, WikiPedia would earn $9 million, which would more than pay the rent.

The Wall Street ripoff is peanuts, compared to the billions of Internet users, myself included, who rip off the Internet for billions of dollars worth of free information and entertainment every day.

This should stop. When it did, every user would pay 2 cents to every page visited. That's 50 visits for a buck, 1,000 visits for $20, or whatever subscription you wanted to pay per month. I would get paid something for what I just wrote, and you would have gotten your 2 cents worth. It would revolutionize the Internet, both for content and business model. It would mean the rebirth of newspapers, for example, and good journalism. Think about it.