Generally my view is that if we change the way IP works, the world would adapt just fine. Instead of large centralized services we might see smaller federated services. For example something like stack overflow could be hosted on an activity-pub based federated system. The way the fediverse currently works is that a large number of enthusiasts support their little corner of the fediverse with server expenses probably in the hundreds of dollars per year. So instead of one big site with hundreds of thousands of dollars in server costs per year you would have thousands of federated servers with costs in the hundreds of dollars per year. What’s great is that as the user base grows so can the number of servers and the number of enthusiast server operators interested in running their own server.

We might also see people start to break down barriers to server costs, for example by lobbying for legal rights to serve content from home with no ISP restrictions related to servers on home internet service. A big company like stack overflow can simply spare the cost of a dedicated business line but thousands of home users might really want to serve content from home.

My point is that when you really think it through, you realize that people will find ways to share the information they want. What’s also cool is that for things like the fediverse there generally are no ads. That’s something big central services fail at.

And then there’s sites like Wikipedia. I guess I don’t know their license but they simply ask people for what amounts to over a hundred million dollars a year in donations and they get it. So centralized models can work on pure donations if they are appreciated by a large number of users.