Infostack on Infostack’s Newsletter

The first avenue, in the upper layers, is to fix publishing's dual engagement and paywall problems. The former is almost entirely out of the control of the publisher and the latter limits readership. Both hurt the advertising model that has and will remain an important aspect of content monetization. This "fix" can then be applied to all applications and content "silos" to improve both user experience and revenue generation. The second area is lower down in the stack in terms of broadband access. Right now there is very little sharing or economization on the supply side and secondly it is everyone for themselves on the demand side. The approach is to use settlements to increase cross-network sharing of resources and users, and enable "centralized procurement" of large edge intranets like schools, hospitals, governments, employers, and other civic institutions to subsidize users' access to make the formers' digital transformations more universal and lower cost. This dramatically increases the revenue opportunity for those same edge networks. Both approaches require competitors to open up and cooperate to improve the user experience. Importantly, settlement systems enable such competitive cooperation, leading to much greater sustainability, amortization of investment, higher ROI and adaptation to new technologies.