I mean, maybe the right answer is just to make the whole thing free. I don't know. I just know it's more complicated than the standard message board discourse suggests.

"How can there be a housing crisis when there are houses available for $1 in Pontiac, MI?"

I think we're close to a pretty nice balance in the status quo: RECAP, and a free tier. If it's me, what you do is jack the free tier up from $30 to $1000.

I think RECAP rules a lot and I have the plugins enabled in the browser session I use to read PACER. I'm just saying, it's not really a liberation of all of PACER.

In the municipality where I live, we're statutorily required to replace lead service lines[†] within the next 5-10 years (I forget how many). The municipality replaces the trunk lines, and homeowners are required to replace the last hop at their own (significant) expense.

Naturally, people are extremely upset about this. They're all being forced to spend a bunch of money, out of the blue. They all want the municipality to pay for their own service line replacement. Other municipalities are doing this.

But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other, because the ultimate source of funds for the things the municipality pays for is our property tax levy. In fact, having the municipality pay for homeowner service line replacement is straightforwardly regressive: it's a subsidy to homeowners, paid in part out of the pockets of people who don't own.

A similar dilemma faces PACER. Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. Court records can, of course, be made "free". But nothing is actually free. To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are... funding the legal profession.

That doesn't mean I think it's great that PACER charges. Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic. But it's also very cheap. I'd imagine that most of the use cases for which it isn't below the cost noise floor are cases that serve professions, in which case I have to ask what the public policy case is for subsidizing those uses.

I don't know, things are complicated.

[†] Added context: lead service lines in Chicagoland aren't necessarily immediately problematic, because the water management department here carefully manages the supply to ensure lead is mineralized; if you test your lead-service tap water for lead, you won't find any.

It's ok if you're totally unfamiliar with this space, but I'd recommend replacing some periods with question marks in your comments.

If there are advantages to ATProto over ActivityPub in this kind of deployment setting, they don't seem clear enough to offset the weird corporate parentage; like, I can see how Mastodon keeps chugging along no matter what companies get sold to who, but I don't see how ATProto survives the death of Bsky.