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The thought of some kind of micro-payment has crossed my mind more than once as a potential alternative to increasingly invasive and annoying advertisements whe

The thought of some kind of micro-payment has crossed my mind more than once as a potential alternative to increasingly invasive and annoying advertisements when it comes to funding content creators. There was a time when I didn't mind ads. Hell, I've discovered some of the Internet content I now enjoy through ads. But now ads have become creepy, following me around the Internet, slowing down and breaking the rendering of sites, and acting as an avenue for the distribution of malware. I'd love to support the various webcomics, music streams, blogs, and other things on the Internet I enjoy without having to open my browser up to unscrupulous ad networks. Yes, now there's sites like Patreon, but that's still opt-in (though admittedly better than the fanclubs of the early 00s, with membership contingent on remembering to send a PayPal again this month). I'd imagined something automagic that Just Worked. You view a website, your viewing of that site shows up on your ISP bill. A hypothetical example I came up with went something like this: After doing an archive binge of some new-to-me webcomic, there was a slight increase of my ISP bill that month. This reflected the additional load I put on the author's over-worked webserver while voraciously consuming in 6 hours the story this artist had spent 6 years producing. His hosting provider billed my ISP and then my ISP billed me. But then I realized, for that to be practically implementable, my ISP would have to know who's looking at what on the Internet at what times. How else would Comcast know the bill they got from Joe Webcomic c/o Bluehost should be billed to me, and not someone else? Such a system could be abused to be an invasive privacy nightmare just as advertisements have become. To say nothing of how governments would love to abuse such. If my ISP knows I visit nifty-webcomic.com and can send me the creator's bill, then so could authorities in Egypt know who to arrest for visiting gay-rights.com. I have yet to come up with a solution for this :/

ex3xu 9y ago
As a theoretical solution to what you are saying, you could implement this in aggregate -- the ISP accepts a flat "content" payment from all its subscribers, sums the time spent on each site from each user, and then pays out micropayments to each content provider as a percentage of the total content payments received from all subscribers. Sort of analogous to how the Tor network prevents deanonymization. You could even implement it as an open-source browser extension in the same fashion as Tor. Ultimately however, this solution has two major flaws that I can think of up front -- first, it is too susceptible to botting, and second, it relies on a steadfastly privacy conscious central party (the ISP in this example) that never accidentally hires an Eric Schmidt-type who gives in to the monetary value of data. Having just read Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants" I don't have a lot of hope for that.
hossbeast 9y ago
The answer is to take the ISP out of this picture. How did they get in there anyway? You pay the content producer directly.
joe_the_user 9y ago
The whole history of the web seems to illustrate to me the impossibility of micropayments - they are fairly inextricably wrapped up with DRM, essentially. But further, there's a very doable "pay stuff as an alternative to ads" approach people talk about occasionally - a multi-newspaper, multi-content-provider "all-your-can-eat" subscription. Charge a rate for each subscriber and divide it among each publication with some multipliers for quality and traffic generation - You'd have a way for publications to get compensated by readers without need for ads. This kind of tech is certainly doable and readers could certainly be found. But problem comes from not reader or tech but the newspaper and content providers generally. A lot of people bemoaning free web content ignore the way that pre-web, long before the web, magazines and newspapers were primarily ad supported. And TV was, of course, entirely ad supported from the start. That was and is the only way to pay for the slick, print fashion magazines you still see and certainly the way to pay for video in it's infancy. Ad agency essentially can and will pay much more to direct your eyeballs than you will pay for your eyeball's and this situation started long before the web (for most values of 'you', please don't fill reply-space with testamonials other, I know about the other 'you'). The problem of the web for newspapers has been that a previously captive audience roamed free and the papers could no longer serve as its gate keepers - a big problem and one that arguably resulted in a serious loss to journalism. But the "oh nose, we lost our subscribers" complaint doesn't tell the whole story - they wanted their subscribers 'cause they were their subscribers unique influencers, not for the money. Which brings us back to micropayments, which one assumes the content providers are eager to get, not because they'd generate lots of revenue but because they'd give the content providers an absolutely exact list of their consumers, with Google no longer possessing this key to the kingdom ... of eyeball control.

ex3xu 9y ago

As a theoretical solution to what you are saying, you could implement this in aggregate -- the ISP accepts a flat "content" payment from all its subscribers, sums the time spent on each site from each user, and then pays out micropayments to each content provider as a percentage of the total content payments received from all subscribers. Sort of analogous to how the Tor network prevents deanonymization. You could even implement it as an open-source browser extension in the same fashion as Tor. Ultimately however, this solution has two major flaws that I can think of up front -- first, it is too susceptible to botting, and second, it relies on a steadfastly privacy conscious central party (the ISP in this example) that never accidentally hires an Eric Schmidt-type who gives in to the monetary value of data. Having just read Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants" I don't have a lot of hope for that.

hossbeast 9y ago

The answer is to take the ISP out of this picture. How did they get in there anyway? You pay the content producer directly.

joe_the_user 9y ago

The whole history of the web seems to illustrate to me the impossibility of micropayments - they are fairly inextricably wrapped up with DRM, essentially. But further, there's a very doable "pay stuff as an alternative to ads" approach people talk about occasionally - a multi-newspaper, multi-content-provider "all-your-can-eat" subscription. Charge a rate for each subscriber and divide it among each publication with some multipliers for quality and traffic generation - You'd have a way for publications to get compensated by readers without need for ads. This kind of tech is certainly doable and readers could certainly be found. But problem comes from not reader or tech but the newspaper and content providers generally. A lot of people bemoaning free web content ignore the way that pre-web, long before the web, magazines and newspapers were primarily ad supported. And TV was, of course, entirely ad supported from the start. That was and is the only way to pay for the slick, print fashion magazines you still see and certainly the way to pay for video in it's infancy. Ad agency essentially can and will pay much more to direct your eyeballs than you will pay for your eyeball's and this situation started long before the web (for most values of 'you', please don't fill reply-space with testamonials other, I know about the other 'you'). The problem of the web for newspapers has been that a previously captive audience roamed free and the papers could no longer serve as its gate keepers - a big problem and one that arguably resulted in a serious loss to journalism. But the "oh nose, we lost our subscribers" complaint doesn't tell the whole story - they wanted their subscribers 'cause they were their subscribers unique influencers, not for the money. Which brings us back to micropayments, which one assumes the content providers are eager to get, not because they'd generate lots of revenue but because they'd give the content providers an absolutely exact list of their consumers, with Google no longer possessing this key to the kingdom ... of eyeball control.