7 ms·

Web Monetization

122 points by manx 6y ago

throwawaysea 6y ago
Can someone explain how this might me made resistant to payment blockades erected by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and the like?
- EGreg 6y ago
  What are those?
  - endgame 6y ago
    Things like "Operation Choke Point", I assume. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/24/operation-choke-point/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... Beyond that, if a major payment provider doesn't like you, you're basically sunk. Horror stories about businesses withering while their PayPal accounts are frozen are almost as old as the WWW itself.
    - 0xy 6y ago
      Not to mention some business models are just outright not possible because of the payment gateway mafia. If you're in the adult business, you pay extortionate fees irrespective of your fraud rate. If you're in legal businesses that are illegal in some areas, you might not be able to transact at all -- even in the legal areas.
      - smnrchrds 6y ago
        If your business does not adhere to all US laws and regulation, despite the fact that you do not do business in the US, you are probably out of luck. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/square-canada-1.5303143 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/square-canada-1.53031...
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    It’s when all major payment processors collude to prevent money from reaching certain businesses. Since they’re essentially a small set of players constituting a duopoly (Visa and MasterCard) or oligopoly once you pull in the other players, there’s not much you can do about it. Their power constitutes a threat to freedom of speech, since they’re also commonly targeted by activists to “deplatform” those they disagree with. The big example is when the credit card companies blocked Wikileaks in 2010: https://www.rawstory.com/2010/12/mastercard-visa-licenses-revoked-iceland-wikileaks/ https://www.rawstory.com/2010/12/mastercard-visa-licenses-re... A more recent example from 2020: https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in-america-visa-blacklisted-my-business-and-my-family-for-building-gab/ https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in-am...
- matdehaast 6y ago
  Great question. For low value payments those payment rails are incredibly expensive. That’s why it operates on the Interledger network. Interledger is a payments clearing protocol modeled on IP where settlement is arranged through peering relationships. It is incredible good at low value payments. Our next work in the space is beginning to open it up to Retail style payments through Open Payments[1]. Initially we are targeting mini payments (<$5). As these are poorly served currently with traditional options due to high fees. However our final goal is much bigger. The real problem we see in digital payments is not MasterCard, Visa and PayPal but Apple, Google and Facebook. We had OpenId but we ended up only getting login with Apple, Facebook and Google. The same is going for payments. We believe Open Payments is a viable alternative to provide an open payments system that is not big tech. [1] openpayments.dev
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > Can someone explain how this might me made resistant to payment blockades erected by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and the like? I'm kind of surprised nobody has automated using cryptocurrency for this. It's possible to buy e.g. Bitcoin with a credit card from a hundred places (right?), so somebody creates a website that takes the user's credit card info, passes it through to any Bitcoin seller and then receives the Bitcoin and transfers the value to the target. From the user's perspective they just paid the target with a credit card. The party actually charging the credit card is the Bitcoin seller, who isn't affiliated with the proxy transaction at all and could be transparently swapped out for anyone who sells cryptocurrency and accepts credit cards without the seller even being aware of the indirection. You could presumably do the same thing with any asset whatsoever. The user gets a charge on their card for gold bullion or baseball cards, which get shipped to the payment exchange and then liquidated again with the proceeds going to the target. But that's probably just unnecessary overhead compared to using cryptocurrency. If there are laws against this in some countries, the site itself would only be glue code running on a webserver, so couldn't it just be located in any place where doing this is legal?
  - 6510 6y ago
    I've pondered variations of this many times. If you ignore complexity some truly fascinating formulas can be had. You can for example create tons of value out of thin air by having traders express an interest in items if they are sold below x. A baseball card could have an infinite number of partial owners and automatically change "hands". Some just want to trade them and are not interested in physically holding onto them (if not worried) while others just want to stick the postal stamps in books and show off. If you are for whatever reason unable to send it to the new 51% owner on his request you automatically refund the entire item at market value.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    > somebody creates a website that takes the user's credit card info, passes it through to any Bitcoin seller and then receives the Bitcoin and transfers the value to the target Two things go wrong: - credit transactions are reversible and bitcoin isn't, so the middle party gets stiffed by fraud - you have to have a merchant account to take credit payments, and the networks will blacklist you if you do things like this
zelly 6y ago
Does Brave implement this? LOL
- ahopebailie 6y ago
  No. Although it would be great if they did.
chris_f 6y ago
I am rooting for this, but I have a hard time understanding how it can gain mass acceptance. Coil [0] is also an interesting app built on top of the Web Monetization API. [0] https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/
- matdehaast 6y ago
  Chris_f I would love someone on our team to talk to you. We are attempting to solve those pain points by working with partners like you. Email me matt at coil domain
bobblywobbles 6y ago
The only icon I recognized was Angular on the page. I feel though a standard of sending money is a little too similar for paying a vendor. I'd personally prefer companies to handle this than a recommendation, because who is to say my payment details are saved and then a malicious script sends the bad actor my money?
emmanueloga_ 6y ago
As usual there seem to be fragmented efforts going on. Does anybody here know what's the difference between these two? * https://webmonetization.org/specification.html https://webmonetization.org/specification.html "Web Monetization is an API that allows websites to request small payments from users facilitated by the browser and the user's Web Monetization provider." * https://www.w3.org/TR/webpayments-overview/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webpayments-overview/ " ? "
- Taek 6y ago
  Fragmented because nobody seems to have found a winning UX yet. Once there is a strong and growing set of users that are happily paying for content on a small set of websites, I believe we will see more consolidation.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    Given the choice, most people won't pay for anything, at all, ever.
    - JacobSeated 6y ago
      Won't - or can not afford... Too many low-paying jobs and unemployed people.
    - 6510 6y ago
      That's just the culture, we can change it. I had the privilege to explain to someone the donation model. wwwwhy would I pay for a free font??? Do people really do this???? edit: When people know a waitress is not- or barely getting paid they are far less likely to not give a tip. We are not alien to the concept.
- matdehaast 6y ago
  That is not fragmentation, even it appears that way. Adrian Hope-Bailie who is part of the web payments working group is also involved in the web monetization spec. WebMo is attempting to align completely with the web payments work. Disclaimer: Work for Coil
mundo 6y ago
If anyone involved with this stops by, could you clarify how Interledger, Coil, and Ripple are related, if at all? It seems like this (Web Monetization) is an attempt to make a w3c standard around browsers initiating transactions out of fintech accounts that support Interledger (a protocol developed by Ripple for moving currency from one ledger to another using escrow) developed by Coil (a micropayments platform), but I might be missing something...
- martijn9612 6y ago
  My understanding is that Interledger is the backend which Coil uses to send payments. Interledger is able to use multiple currencies, ranging from crypto to fiat. Ripple is mostly just building the infrastructure for it, enabling growth in the crypto ecosystem. I think, for them, the payoff would be that using XRP is be the cheapest solution in the end, which would make it interesting. Also quite important, they also directly benefit from there being more entries in all orderbooks, since their software will be more efficient (ODL, on-demand liquidity). They have a benefit for the entire (all cryptos) ecosystem to thrive.
  - ahopebailie 6y ago
    This is a pretty good summary. Interledger (interledger.org) is a protocol stack and a network. The network consists of a number of companies that have setup arrangements to settle payments between them via different payment rails and implemented the Interledger protocol to make those payments. The Interledger network is used to send payments between these companies consisting of millions of tiny packets (each worth nano-cents) allowing for very small amounts to be sent at close to zero cost. Coil is one of the companies using the Interledger network as it is perfect for our use case of Web Monetization (which is only viable on a payment network that allows very small payments without a fixed fee). We originally developed the Interledger protocol at Ripple and there are still folks at Ripple that participate in the community. I think Ripple's incentive for seeing Interledger succeed are well described above.
thearchitect1 6y ago
No thanks
JacobSeated 6y ago
Without a concise and fact-based description of what constitutes "corrupt business models", I think they ought to avoid mentioning "corruption" entirely; it does not really serve a useful purpose.
- matdehaast 6y ago
  That is fair feedback, thanks. Will raise an issue in the repo.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
I'm wondering where telcos and ISPs stand in this context. I mean, given almost everybody owns a mobile, and telcos already have your details and payment data anyway, it's surprising that no telco-backed payment solution has emerged (except for maybe mpesa in Africa), when telcos are already part of a highly regulated market (in EU at least) and could be further regulated to provide payments in a non-discriminatory way to the benefit of both the telco and the user. In the 1990s, downloadable ringtones with anonymous payments via special phone numbers were widely used, making use of MMS which has an option to request paid content where the UI asks you if you want to accept the paid content. What's the reason for this not taking off? Is it that previous efforts were failures, or that Telcos were too greedy or what? Or was it ruined by Google and Apple who'd rather want you to consume their ads or paid media offerings?
- ohazi 6y ago
  Because telcos and ISPs have a reputation for comically bad UX?
  - 6510 6y ago
    I buy 1 GB data a month ago for my prepaid phone for 10 euro. I thought 1 GB isn't much so I buy another one. Turns out you can only top it off to 1 GB. I thought meh.. then I got an SMS message announcing it would expire after 30 days. I dunno, you could put that kind of stuff above the form?
    - tannhaeuser 6y ago
      1GB for 10EUR on a prepaid in EU is way too much. In Germany, the price is about one tenth that (7-8GB for 9EUR) and that's supposedly already a high-price region when it comes to phone rates as they say. I believe in other parts of Europe (Lithuania, Estonia?) you can get up to 40GB LTE for 10EUR. I've worked for telcos, and postpaid is indeed very much about "buying customers" via deals/sales prediction models and customer retention; they kindof have to do this, else they simply wouldn't exist in the marketplace. But for prepaid, OTOH, I can't see anything wrong with the prices (ok you don't get a sponsored spyware device every other year).
aabbcc1241 6y ago
It is relative easy to ask developers to implement ways to charge users; how accessible is it to the end users?
cercatrova 6y ago
Can someone explain how with web monetization we won't have microtransactions on the Internet as we do with games? i.e. I don't want to pay per article read, as that would take away from the unlimited nature of the internet, where for a flat fee to my ISP, I can read/watch/listen to whatever I want.
- matdehaast 6y ago
  That is a great question and partly why there is valuing in having a Web Monetization Provider such as Coil. The job of the provider is to optimize and distribute the spend in a way that gives you the best experience. There is still much to be explored here but the basic premise is that the Provider basically makes micro-decisions for you so you don't have to.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    So now I pay the ISP as well as a third party? Seems excessive, it's like streaming services all over again. Some content will be gated behind one provider, and others behind another.

122 points by manx 6y ago

Can someone explain how this might me made resistant to payment blockades erected by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and the like?

EGreg 6y ago
What are those?
- endgame 6y ago
  Things like "Operation Choke Point", I assume. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/24/operation-choke-point/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... Beyond that, if a major payment provider doesn't like you, you're basically sunk. Horror stories about businesses withering while their PayPal accounts are frozen are almost as old as the WWW itself.
  - 0xy 6y ago
    Not to mention some business models are just outright not possible because of the payment gateway mafia. If you're in the adult business, you pay extortionate fees irrespective of your fraud rate. If you're in legal businesses that are illegal in some areas, you might not be able to transact at all -- even in the legal areas.
    - smnrchrds 6y ago
      If your business does not adhere to all US laws and regulation, despite the fact that you do not do business in the US, you are probably out of luck. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/square-canada-1.5303143 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/square-canada-1.53031...
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  It’s when all major payment processors collude to prevent money from reaching certain businesses. Since they’re essentially a small set of players constituting a duopoly (Visa and MasterCard) or oligopoly once you pull in the other players, there’s not much you can do about it. Their power constitutes a threat to freedom of speech, since they’re also commonly targeted by activists to “deplatform” those they disagree with. The big example is when the credit card companies blocked Wikileaks in 2010: https://www.rawstory.com/2010/12/mastercard-visa-licenses-revoked-iceland-wikileaks/ https://www.rawstory.com/2010/12/mastercard-visa-licenses-re... A more recent example from 2020: https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in-america-visa-blacklisted-my-business-and-my-family-for-building-gab/ https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in-am...
matdehaast 6y ago
Great question. For low value payments those payment rails are incredibly expensive. That’s why it operates on the Interledger network. Interledger is a payments clearing protocol modeled on IP where settlement is arranged through peering relationships. It is incredible good at low value payments. Our next work in the space is beginning to open it up to Retail style payments through Open Payments[1]. Initially we are targeting mini payments (<$5). As these are poorly served currently with traditional options due to high fees. However our final goal is much bigger. The real problem we see in digital payments is not MasterCard, Visa and PayPal but Apple, Google and Facebook. We had OpenId but we ended up only getting login with Apple, Facebook and Google. The same is going for payments. We believe Open Payments is a viable alternative to provide an open payments system that is not big tech. [1] openpayments.dev
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> Can someone explain how this might me made resistant to payment blockades erected by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and the like? I'm kind of surprised nobody has automated using cryptocurrency for this. It's possible to buy e.g. Bitcoin with a credit card from a hundred places (right?), so somebody creates a website that takes the user's credit card info, passes it through to any Bitcoin seller and then receives the Bitcoin and transfers the value to the target. From the user's perspective they just paid the target with a credit card. The party actually charging the credit card is the Bitcoin seller, who isn't affiliated with the proxy transaction at all and could be transparently swapped out for anyone who sells cryptocurrency and accepts credit cards without the seller even being aware of the indirection. You could presumably do the same thing with any asset whatsoever. The user gets a charge on their card for gold bullion or baseball cards, which get shipped to the payment exchange and then liquidated again with the proceeds going to the target. But that's probably just unnecessary overhead compared to using cryptocurrency. If there are laws against this in some countries, the site itself would only be glue code running on a webserver, so couldn't it just be located in any place where doing this is legal?
- 6510 6y ago
  I've pondered variations of this many times. If you ignore complexity some truly fascinating formulas can be had. You can for example create tons of value out of thin air by having traders express an interest in items if they are sold below x. A baseball card could have an infinite number of partial owners and automatically change "hands". Some just want to trade them and are not interested in physically holding onto them (if not worried) while others just want to stick the postal stamps in books and show off. If you are for whatever reason unable to send it to the new 51% owner on his request you automatically refund the entire item at market value.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > somebody creates a website that takes the user's credit card info, passes it through to any Bitcoin seller and then receives the Bitcoin and transfers the value to the target Two things go wrong: - credit transactions are reversible and bitcoin isn't, so the middle party gets stiffed by fraud - you have to have a merchant account to take credit payments, and the networks will blacklist you if you do things like this

zelly 6y ago

Does Brave implement this? LOL

ahopebailie 6y ago
No. Although it would be great if they did.

chris_f 6y ago

I am rooting for this, but I have a hard time understanding how it can gain mass acceptance. Coil [0] is also an interesting app built on top of the Web Monetization API. [0] https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/

matdehaast 6y ago
Chris_f I would love someone on our team to talk to you. We are attempting to solve those pain points by working with partners like you. Email me matt at coil domain

bobblywobbles 6y ago

The only icon I recognized was Angular on the page. I feel though a standard of sending money is a little too similar for paying a vendor. I'd personally prefer companies to handle this than a recommendation, because who is to say my payment details are saved and then a malicious script sends the bad actor my money?

emmanueloga_ 6y ago

As usual there seem to be fragmented efforts going on. Does anybody here know what's the difference between these two? * https://webmonetization.org/specification.html https://webmonetization.org/specification.html "Web Monetization is an API that allows websites to request small payments from users facilitated by the browser and the user's Web Monetization provider." * https://www.w3.org/TR/webpayments-overview/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webpayments-overview/ " ? "

Taek 6y ago
Fragmented because nobody seems to have found a winning UX yet. Once there is a strong and growing set of users that are happily paying for content on a small set of websites, I believe we will see more consolidation.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Given the choice, most people won't pay for anything, at all, ever.
  - JacobSeated 6y ago
    Won't - or can not afford... Too many low-paying jobs and unemployed people.
  - 6510 6y ago
    That's just the culture, we can change it. I had the privilege to explain to someone the donation model. wwwwhy would I pay for a free font??? Do people really do this???? edit: When people know a waitress is not- or barely getting paid they are far less likely to not give a tip. We are not alien to the concept.
matdehaast 6y ago
That is not fragmentation, even it appears that way. Adrian Hope-Bailie who is part of the web payments working group is also involved in the web monetization spec. WebMo is attempting to align completely with the web payments work. Disclaimer: Work for Coil

mundo 6y ago

If anyone involved with this stops by, could you clarify how Interledger, Coil, and Ripple are related, if at all? It seems like this (Web Monetization) is an attempt to make a w3c standard around browsers initiating transactions out of fintech accounts that support Interledger (a protocol developed by Ripple for moving currency from one ledger to another using escrow) developed by Coil (a micropayments platform), but I might be missing something...

martijn9612 6y ago
My understanding is that Interledger is the backend which Coil uses to send payments. Interledger is able to use multiple currencies, ranging from crypto to fiat. Ripple is mostly just building the infrastructure for it, enabling growth in the crypto ecosystem. I think, for them, the payoff would be that using XRP is be the cheapest solution in the end, which would make it interesting. Also quite important, they also directly benefit from there being more entries in all orderbooks, since their software will be more efficient (ODL, on-demand liquidity). They have a benefit for the entire (all cryptos) ecosystem to thrive.
- ahopebailie 6y ago
  This is a pretty good summary. Interledger (interledger.org) is a protocol stack and a network. The network consists of a number of companies that have setup arrangements to settle payments between them via different payment rails and implemented the Interledger protocol to make those payments. The Interledger network is used to send payments between these companies consisting of millions of tiny packets (each worth nano-cents) allowing for very small amounts to be sent at close to zero cost. Coil is one of the companies using the Interledger network as it is perfect for our use case of Web Monetization (which is only viable on a payment network that allows very small payments without a fixed fee). We originally developed the Interledger protocol at Ripple and there are still folks at Ripple that participate in the community. I think Ripple's incentive for seeing Interledger succeed are well described above.

thearchitect1 6y ago

No thanks

JacobSeated 6y ago

Without a concise and fact-based description of what constitutes "corrupt business models", I think they ought to avoid mentioning "corruption" entirely; it does not really serve a useful purpose.

matdehaast 6y ago
That is fair feedback, thanks. Will raise an issue in the repo.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

I'm wondering where telcos and ISPs stand in this context. I mean, given almost everybody owns a mobile, and telcos already have your details and payment data anyway, it's surprising that no telco-backed payment solution has emerged (except for maybe mpesa in Africa), when telcos are already part of a highly regulated market (in EU at least) and could be further regulated to provide payments in a non-discriminatory way to the benefit of both the telco and the user. In the 1990s, downloadable ringtones with anonymous payments via special phone numbers were widely used, making use of MMS which has an option to request paid content where the UI asks you if you want to accept the paid content. What's the reason for this not taking off? Is it that previous efforts were failures, or that Telcos were too greedy or what? Or was it ruined by Google and Apple who'd rather want you to consume their ads or paid media offerings?

ohazi 6y ago
Because telcos and ISPs have a reputation for comically bad UX?
- 6510 6y ago
  I buy 1 GB data a month ago for my prepaid phone for 10 euro. I thought 1 GB isn't much so I buy another one. Turns out you can only top it off to 1 GB. I thought meh.. then I got an SMS message announcing it would expire after 30 days. I dunno, you could put that kind of stuff above the form?
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    1GB for 10EUR on a prepaid in EU is way too much. In Germany, the price is about one tenth that (7-8GB for 9EUR) and that's supposedly already a high-price region when it comes to phone rates as they say. I believe in other parts of Europe (Lithuania, Estonia?) you can get up to 40GB LTE for 10EUR. I've worked for telcos, and postpaid is indeed very much about "buying customers" via deals/sales prediction models and customer retention; they kindof have to do this, else they simply wouldn't exist in the marketplace. But for prepaid, OTOH, I can't see anything wrong with the prices (ok you don't get a sponsored spyware device every other year).

aabbcc1241 6y ago

It is relative easy to ask developers to implement ways to charge users; how accessible is it to the end users?

cercatrova 6y ago

Can someone explain how with web monetization we won't have microtransactions on the Internet as we do with games? i.e. I don't want to pay per article read, as that would take away from the unlimited nature of the internet, where for a flat fee to my ISP, I can read/watch/listen to whatever I want.

matdehaast 6y ago
That is a great question and partly why there is valuing in having a Web Monetization Provider such as Coil. The job of the provider is to optimize and distribute the spend in a way that gives you the best experience. There is still much to be explored here but the basic premise is that the Provider basically makes micro-decisions for you so you don't have to.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  So now I pay the ISP as well as a third party? Seems excessive, it's like streaming services all over again. Some content will be gated behind one provider, and others behind another.