This page is for discussing the content of the paragraph 8: Media control
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8. Media control
We consider imperative to encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media and to promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints. We believe democracy requires a wide citizens’ exposition to different topics, ideas and different point of view not specifically selected in advance.
The financing of the media is a burning question: at present there is a vicious triangle of author-reader-advertiser. The readers should actually directly pay the authors for their works or the enjoyment of them. As long as works were distributed on physical media that were difficult to reproduce, such as books and vinyl discs, the reader’s purchase of a copy was also the way to pay the author and for a specific work at a specific time. But broadcasting and certainly the digital media changed that model. The vicious triangle also has built-in the possibility of control over expression by the advertiser.
We propose an experiment with micro-payments and digital cash to break this vicious triangle. The availability of micro-payments could also solve many problems of intellectual property, since these are now implicitly connected to macro-payments for goods that no longer have a physical substrate.