Before you can start charging for your product you need to make it popular and irreplaceable. I’d argue that ABCNews.com is neither and any attempt to charge for content will be pretty much ignored as the visitors move on to another news website.

The best way for them to monitize their online presence is through acquisition and monopoly. The megacorporations that own all mainstream media outlets (and almost everything else), namely General Electric, Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, NewsCorp, AT&T, Sony, Universal, Bertelsmann, Vivendi, and Liberty Media, should create either a single cooperative entity, or somewhat smaller entities that are virtually unitary through the use of strategic partnerships in order to skirt antitrust laws long enough to be institutionalized and to maximize the flexibility for strategic pricing to maximize revenue. This entity or entities should buy out any online content that attracts a significant readership, not with the goal of attracting more people to fork over the cash to get behind their federated paywall, but with the goal of eliminating the free access to interesting content that is outside _any_ paywall, which will achieve the same end, and will make very large offers to independent writers and groups of writers rational, even when the odds are against directly recouping the investment.

This will create a new career path for aspiring writers (and artists and technical staff), and their success will generally become measured by the amount of payoff that they get from the consortium for coming in from the cold. If internet forums are included as internet media ripe for acquisition, itwill reduce the internet to the sites containing the products of the consortium, and sites trying to sell traditional goods and services. A benefit of this to the consortium and to the governments that by this time will have become some of its members will be that illegal acts on the internet (such as copyright violation) or minority political groups who are communicating with each other for suspicious purposes will be easy to single out, because they will be the only activity on the internet that will be outside of the paywall that isn’t clearly an act of traditional commerce.

This consortium will also own all means of internet delivery, so after it eliminates all discussion of net neutrality through lobbying and appointing its own people to the appropriate agencies and touting the variety of content now being provided by the consortium (much of it obviously speaking against the interests of the consortium itself, because the consortium will be interested in everything – war, healthcare, agriculture, unions etc.) it will be able to eliminate all other content from accessibility. After this is when it will start exercising hard and absolute editorial control over the content that it puts out. And after that is when the white vans will start their runs early in the morning, delivering the proper psychoactive drugs in the proper amount to every proper citizen every morning, and watching them swallow. All of the improper citizens that try in some way to deceive them or avoid their therapy will be dealt with in the proper way that all deluded enemies of the activities of the Ministry of Freedom _should_ be dealt with. You don’t actually need a van to carry pills. Or a pistol.

Wait, I think I went too far…