Last week was a pretty horrible one for the Internet.

The events of Ferguson, Missouri are still unfolding, and as they do the Internet seems to get more dark. Then there was Robin Williams's death, and amongst the outpouring of love, there was of course a couple of rotten apples who scared Williams's daughter off social media altogether by tweeting a fake picture of Williams's corpse.

For as long as I've been on the Internet, it's surprising that things still shock me, but that one was a pretty hefty punch to the gut for me and the human race in general. It's a pretty open-and-shut case when it comes to assigning a designation to those types of people. And although numerous expletive-laden phrases are certainly apt, the common terminology is troll.

Twitter quickly suspended the accounts responsible for the Williams hoax, and then it realized (way too late) that its lax policy on taking action on such accounts and the people behind them simply aren't working. Twitter has pledged to do better, but truthfully, no matter how many people or algorithms you throw at a problem like this, it's simply a band-aid, and inevitably, the worst trolls find a way.

So how can Twitter and other social media platforms combat trolls in a meaningful way? I started thinking about how the NFL and Major League Baseball deal with infractions, from silly things like wearing unapproved ribbons (NFL), to the three-strike policy of baseball's steroid/banned substances rules. It's pretty simple, you hit them in the wallet, and if that doesn't work, they're banned for life.

So here's my proposal. If you want to sign up for Twitter, you need to connect a method of payment to your account. If you tweet anything hateful, racist, etc, you're fined $25 and suspended from Twitter for one day. Upon suspension, an automatic tweet is sent to your followers announcing your suspension, which of course can be retweeted to achieve full shaming effect. If you're stupid enough to have a second offense, that's $100 and a one-week suspension from being able to tweet. For the real a-holes who just can't learn a lesson, a third offense results in a lifetime ban from Twitter, and every possible piece of information -- IP address, email, name, etc. is monitored by Twitter to prevent you from signing up again with another name.

Doesn't that whole concept reek of machiavellian awfulness? Of course it does, but at this point, what's the alternative? Trolls are like terrorist cells. They're everywhere and even if one gets eliminated, there's two more to take its place (that also applies to HYDRA). But I feel like this is the point we're at now. That's sad and terrible, but it's the truth. I used to think turning comments off was *the* solution, and while I do think comments have become useless, and largely a hotbed for hate and racism, turning them off is only going to drive the poison to even more public forums like Twitter and Facebook, where a hateful or factually corrupt tweet or status update can spread like a disease across the globe and turn supposed rational human beings into muckrakers of misinformation, hate, and other dark things.

They say money cannot buy happiness, but can it buy a slightly kindler and gentler Internet? Because after last week, I'm ready to try anything.