Our Goal

As you may have read from our home page, "Our goal, with your help, is to push forward the ability of any person to access various services on the internet for free." But what does this mean for The People's Internet, and what steps are we taking to accomplish it?

Let's start with what we mean by our goal. We believe, as an organization, that it is not the right thing to do to put the core facets of functionality on the internet behind paywalls. This does not mean we don't believe people should profit off of the internet. We believe that may, in some cases, be the only thing keeping free services up. This may seem contradictory. We believe in creators making profit, but not in paying for services? This is where our problem with the internet comes in.

In the current way that the internet functions, these paywalls fall on the user and are often the only option to proceed. We know that there are other ways to make this money. Despite these alternatives being risky, they often prove more profitable in a program's future. But what are these alternatives? Advertising and "Convenience" paywalls. Although there are many more than the two we list, they are likely the best options for most.

First, advertising. We have to admit, users hate ads. But what do users hate more than ads? Required monthly payments. Why advertising? Although it may slightly harm user experience, it completely makes up for it in the subtraction from costs. Advertisements can be combined with a "no ads" paywall (as long as the pricing is reasonable). This can give profit and still allow anybody to use your service.

Second, "Convenience" paywalls. We think that in no way should paywalls limit the "normal user" usage of a service. Charging for more than normal usage is perfectly fine, as it likely costs the host of the service money. We also encourage charging to remove ads or for convenience features. Convenience features are features that exist only to speed up the process of the user, but should not include any additional functionality that may not be possible otherwise.

This may sound good, but it is reasonable to wonder what we are doing to accomplish this view, and what is the incentive to follow along? The most obvious of our work is informing, as you can see just about everywhere on our site. However, we are also working to create our own programs that follow these ideas. We hope that we can keep designing such programs and supporting others in the future. To those who follow along, it is possible even to see a loss at the start, as money from profit sources is not enough to cover backend costs (see Issues With Paid Services). But the future investment in this path is much bigger. Most tech giants you could think of, but most notably Google, follow a similar set of ideas. User bases will grow much faster, so even a small profit margin could mean massive results from such a service.

And finally, we must express the true importance of the future impacts resulting from our goal. The internet is expanding into just about every area of life, and this expansion could only grow exponentially. We are in the middle of an upturning of our world caused by our acceleration of innovation, and it is inevitable that just about everybody's life will be changed by this shift. The question we must ask is, if the people of this generation have such a power to change everybody's way of life for generations to come, how should we use that power? It is a decision that must be made quickly. Things can stay similar to how they were, but we can also give power to the everyday person through an open internet. That is a decision we have already made. We encourage you to make it too.