BTDT (I wrote a monthly magazine column for more than half a decade; I write for a living). There are other ways to earn a crust with the pen than through adver

BTDT (I wrote a monthly magazine column for more than half a decade; I write for a living). There are other ways to earn a crust with the pen than through advertising. The real headache with paywalls is that buying access is a pain in the arse, with price structures that make no sense from the casual browser's point of view. What we really need is a robust microbilling architecture ... but back when the web began to take its shape in 1994-96 the transaction cost was prohibitive for micro-billing (V.34bis modems rather than broadband put a floor under minimum TCP/IP connection costs that exceeded the sort of transaction size expected for micro-billing).