Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. It's a micropayment model. When you read, you pay, and the payments are distributed, word by word, to all the creators of the input text.
It's for storing expensive information in expensive computers to be sold expensively.
Think of it as a successor to Mead Data Central, Lexis, and Nexis[1], early centralized and expensive information retrieval systems. (Those are still around, merged into Reed Elsevier, publisher of expensive books and journals.)
The technology became cheap enough that such a business model was unnecessary. Although it was considered in the early days of the Web. Early thinking was that you'd have to subscribe to everything, and there would be charges on your Internet bill for each service, like cable TV. You'd pay to subscribe to a search engine. The New York Times went that route successfully, but few others did.
I knew some of the people behind Xanadu in the 1980s. They were mostly everything-is-a-market libertarians.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis
The technology became cheap enough that such a business model was unnecessary. Although it was considered in the early days of the Web. Early thinking was that you'd have to subscribe to everything, and there would be charges on your Internet bill for each service, like cable TV. You'd pay to subscribe to a search engine. The New York Times went that route successfully, but few others did.
I knew some of the people behind Xanadu in the 1980s. They were mostly everything-is-a-market libertarians.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis