Arguing that micropayments are the fix is analogous to using the live tiles ux on the desktop or the querty keyboard on a cell phone. Migrating a solution to a

Arguing that micropayments are the fix is analogous to using the live tiles ux on the desktop or the querty keyboard on a cell phone. Migrating a solution to a new form factor because it has been succesful in the past or because there is a sulerficial similarity rarely ends up being a good design decision. Often when it works it is not at all for the reasons one initially presumed. UX is all about matching intuitive user behavior with a solutions feature set as naturally as possible. The free vs fee problem is more similiar to this that on initial inspection. How does the user behave when coming across a web site which, as a part of its feature set, requires a transaction prior to proceeding with the use case? To say that micropayments categorically won’t work is to equate the Internet with a homogeneous payment network. Sure, it’s been huge for commerce, but that isn’t what the internet is, at all. The analogy doesn’t carry. Micropayments are already working in some cases. This is exactly what Spotify is. User pays Spotify. User listens to tons of random songs. User pays Spotify. Spotify pays artists/corps pro rata. Sometimes a penny here, a nickel there. Kinda like, micropayments. Spotify seems to be doing ok. The artists, that’s another story. The Internet is not one thing. The Internet it more than the sum of its physically parts. It will have many solutions. I wish one-size-fits-all solutions would stop being put proposed. It’s exactly what the Internet isn’t. In fact, the centralization of advert brokers and personal information brokers is exactly what I don’t like about the Internet at the moment.