CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

What I don't quite understand is why we haven't merely come to the conclusion that, like everything else, the internet costs money. Running servers and services costs money, and by giving it away for "free" from the get-go encases certain types of problems in the platform itself. I'm not talking about paying your ISP, I'm talking about accessing websites.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no cost to making a request over the internet. Why not? Why doesn't every http request have a corresponding price associated with it? You can access the resource if you pay. I imagine this would be a minuscule amount ($0.00001 or less per request). Then, instead of trying to solve for monetizing eyeballs or personal data, these problems are solved with economics.

From TFA:

> If a spammer needs to spend 0.0001 € in power to access the site only to gain a marginal profit of 0.00005 €, they are losing money with every site access. However, if a ticket scalper needs to spend 0.0001 € in power to buy a ticket that they will later sell at a 200 € profit, this will not stop them.

This fixes indians in boilerrooms and nigerian spam emailers but specifically not ticket scalpers. The profit is too large.

Also because users don't actually control the number of HTTP requests they make. Think of sites that load individual icons rather than sprite sheets. Think of sites that fire off 1,000 tracking calls per minute. So respectfully screw that.

And, long before the proof-of-work thing was popularized, people were already farming out high-margin captcha solves to cube farms full of people in Asia.

Maybe if we do this then those sites will be disincentivized from doing all the tracking. Because consumer's will get their bill, say "what the fuck", and go to a competitor.

That didn’t work at all for cookie banners. People just accept enshittification when it’s just a minor inconvenience. $0.00001 http requests would solidly fall into that category, and then it would just be marginally worse across the board.

Nobody is paying for a cookie banner. Also the cookie banners aren't even required on almost all the sites you see them on - they chose to put those there because they're lazy.

You're attributing to avg consumer a much higher degree of both tech-savviness and market power than is realistic.

Consumers should learn tech-savviness and I don't think I'm attributing too much.

Phone bills used to be really complicated with minutes and long distance and cross country. And consumers learned and adjusted their behaviors to reduce their bills.

Consumers are stupid but not that stupid.