Fixing the Internet—Part 1: The Cost of Data

Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google… these companies are evil. You know it, I know it. It’s plainly obvious.

But what can we do about it? How can we fix the state of the world?

I think we start small with a simple solution: taxes.

Sure, you’ll hear slacktivists cry “tax the rich” and whatever. And that would be nice. We should definitely do that.

But I have a better idea. One that addresses the source of basically every modern crisis on the Internet.

The reality is: Meta, Google, Amazon… we lived for eons without them. We don’t need them.

But they certainly need us. Or, more specifically, they need our data.

So what should we do?

Answer: we raise the cost of maintaining their ineffably large panopticon.

See, they live and die by the proverbial black gold of online surveillance.

Google sells your info to the highest bidder in an auction house of their own design—one that works more like a casino than an exchange.

And what do we get for it? Highly targeted, highly manipulative ads that demand ever-more-intimidate insight into our day-to-day lives.

What about Meta? Facebook collects your personal data. And yeah, that’s one of those “it goes without saying” methods.

But I’d argue the scope of it isn’t obvious. In fact, the scope is nearly incomprehensible.

Facebook doesn’t just store your profile picture. It tracks how frequently you change your profile picture. It hires legions of professionally trained psychologists to correlate a change of your profile picture to your current emotional state. Then they use that data to decide how susceptible you’ll be to one of their ingeniously coercive ads and they sell that data to the highest bidder.

Facebook listens to everything you’re doing within earshot of your phone. They’re tapped in to your microphone. But they’re also looking at the other applications you have on your device and how much attention you’re giving them. They’re watching the things you type (and then delete) into the status box. They’re monitoring every possible metric, they’re documenting every conceivable data point, they’re exfiltrating every practicable analytic in order to coerce you into buying a Coca-cola.

And let’s not forget about X and how they’re cornering the incel market. X is selling you an AI girlfriend. All with the aim of gaining your trust while radicalizing you into their Nazi-adjacent legion of Musk-ivite cultists.

None of these evil practices (and, let’s be clear, an AI girlfriend is probably the most evil thing I’ve listed so far) would be possible if these companies couldn’t afford to collect your information.

It’s 2025. In under 25 years we went from computers that looked like this

…to computers that look like this.

We went from one computer in 35% of US households that used a phone line to dial into the Internet to a smartphone in everyone’s pocket, ubiquitous 4G Internet, and free WiFi at every coffee shop, airport terminal, and hotel.

So I don’t want to hear anyone say that what I’m proposing is “impossible.”

In 1945, the idea that we’d be on the moon in less than 25 years probably seemed impossible, too.

But it’s 2025. We have the know-how to do this and we have the lived experience to understand just how important this is.

So, enough beating around the bush. What am I proposing?

Taxes. Taxes are a simple, but effective tool.

And I’m proposing a data tax. I’m proposing that any for-profit platform with over 100,000 users has to pay a tax on any data they collect and store.

Moreover, I’m proposing a tax on the types of data collected.

Now, these numbers are rough figures and they’re based on my intuition, but I propose as such:

Calculating a company’s tax bill would be simple: count the number of items that fall into each category and then multiply the sum by $1.25.

So if a service has 100,000 users, that would be a score of 60,000.

Let’s say half of those users have an avatar photo. Those images would count as User Generated Content and would result in a score of 35,000.

If the service has one geolocation datapoint on 75% of their users, that would result in a score of 52,500.

And finally, if 2/3rds of their users installed the app on their phone and the app phones home and says “I’ve just been installed,” that would count as Passive User Telemetry, meaning a score of 46,662.

Now that we’ve calculated the score, we just need to multiply this by $1.25 to reach a yearly tax rate of $242,702.50.

That sounds like a lot. And it is. And in reality, companies don’t have one geolocation datapoint per customer. They’ve got thousands. And it’s not a singular “I’ve been installed” telemetry datapoint, either. No. It’s tens of thousands of datapoints a week.

So, let’s consider a conservative estimate for a single user:

So the average user on a platform that is fairly conservative with its data collection would cost the server $8,257.50 per month. Multiply that by 100,000 users?

The goal here is simple: to disincentivize the collection and storage of user details.

Companies would be charged this tax based on the size of their userbase and there would be carveouts for non-profits and medical institutions, of course.

And if a company didn’t want to pay these taxes, they could simply change their storage practices. If you don’t want to be taxed, don’t store user data. It’s that simple.

I think any reasonable person would agree that the amount of data collected about each of us is obscene and unnecessary. That’s why we need to make the cost of such obscenity out of reach.

Why I Believe This Would Be Effective

Have you ever opened an app only to see that it has updated overnight and now everything looks and acts completely different? You can thank passive user data collection for that. You see, most developers log everything you do in their app. Every button you click, every menu you open, etc. And they’ll steal that information from you, store it on their servers, and then manipulate it to justify complete overhauls of their apps that remove useful features or—worse yet—gate features you used to use behind a paywall.

If we made the cost of passively stealing your usage stats cost them more money than they’re willing to spend, suddenly, they would be unable to make these kinds of sweeping and unilateral changes without fear of losing revenue streams they already know work.

For these tycoons, in the end, it all comes back to money. If Mark Zuckerberg can’t afford to fall back on “data driven decisions,” then he’ll have to start doing honest business. A tall order, I know. But it’d be that or go bankrupt.

Additionally, if we levy taxes on companies that store your personal data and they stop collecting that data, that will mean there’s less data to be leaked. That will mean there’s less manipulative ads. That will result in less algorithmic extremism. It will be a balm to the raw, aching hide of our culture that has fractured and torn under the stress of the robber barons and their accelerationist rhetoric.

A social media app has no need steal your passive usage statistics. A bank doesn’t need to keep a copy of your ID in a database. Microsoft has no right to look at which browser you’ve decided to use and nag you if you make the “wrong” decision. Google has no right to use your personal emails as a means of selling you brownies. And Mark Zuckerberg should not be able to manipulate elections by weaponizing our data against us in a psyops campaign.

It’s time we make the cost of engaging in these unethical business practices out of reach.