Example of everyday surfing

Please bear with me as far as the software goes; I think it wouldn't be hard to figure out:

You would log in on a computer using username and password, and browse as usual. You would have a home page with social networking functions (like you do today on myspace or facebook) and you would have email.

In the corner of your screen would be a counter showing how much you spend on digital media (bear with me here; the parts of the internet that are free now would still be free). You would surf as usual, except any media that is for-pay media would be marked with something that tells you how much it costs (a little blue square means it costs one cent, green costs two cents, etc.) If you view stuff that costs money, you would be instantly and automatically charged.

Lots of stuff would be free, just like with the internet today (that is, that stuff would have no little blue squares next to it), and some free media products would be supported by advertising, just like today. However, if you were to decide that you don't want to see any advertising you could click a button to 'turn advertising off', in which case as you browse you would be charged the small sums otherwise generated by advertising. The money would go in full to the authors of the content you view.

Users would have pages that have social network functions, but could designate whether certain things on their pages cost money for other users to view. So, for example, an independent rock band could post their songs (like on MySpace) and get one cent, or a part of a cent, for each playing of the song (or, say, fifty cents for unlimited access to the song by a viewer).

Well-visited bloggers would become professionals without any association with a media corporation -- if a blog were to get two million visits then the author would get 20,000 dollars, charging one cent per view. Individuals could become independent professional reporters or filmmakers or musicians by creating content which is viewed by many.

The web would include much more than it currently does, since more copyrighted materials would be posted. Getting access to those extra materials would be much easier than today, and access would cost less since the middlemen would no longer exist; for example, books could be posted such that reading several pages costs a few cents -- and that money would bypass publishers and bookstores and go straight to the author.

The backbone of the system -- the individual accounts and the social networking function -- should be, I think, based on a non-profit or government-run network. Other software applications could be developed by for-profit companies (like the add-on applications one sees on Facebook).

Compliance issues (policing and legal questions) are still unresolved, but one possible approach would be to base each social network page in a local community, like is happening with WikiSpot pages. In this way the mountainous task of policing hundreds of millions of pages might be broken down to correspond to physical communities, policed by individuals in each geographical area.