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Why would it be a good idea to place the burden on the browser? That's like shooting the messenger. All of these websites whose life seems to depend on being p

by elric 5y ago

Why would it be a good idea to place the burden on the browser? That's like shooting the messenger. All of these websites whose life seems to depend on being personal-data-thieves should simply go the way of the dinosaur. If you can't make enough money to keep your site afloat without violating people's rights, then your website shouldn't exist. What I'd prefer, and where browsers could actually play an integral part, is an easier system for online (micro)payments. Want to read this article? Pay €0.05 please. No registration required. Want a monthly subscription? That'll be €5/month, please create an account. I loved the web when most websites were either run by universities, or by people who just wanted to share. You know, when things were actually free. Now it seems like everyone and their grandmonther wants to profit off of every little blog by selling my personal data. Which is ridiculous, considering it's an order of magnitude cheaper to host a site than it was in the 90s.

tzs 5y ago
> What I'd prefer, and where browsers could actually play an integral part, is an easier system for online (micro)payments. Want to read this article? Pay €0.05 please. No registration required. Want a monthly subscription? That'll be €5/month, please create an account. Micropayments are much harder than most people realize. It's not at all hard to design a system that can handle the actual payment part of micropayments. It's the legal environment around micropayments that is hard. A big problem is taxes. If I'm in jurisdiction X and your site is in jurisdiction Y and I pay you for access to an article, X may consider that a sale in X and want you to pay VAT or sales tax. Even if you don't meet the minimum volume requirement that a X has before taxes kick in, many jurisdictions still require you to register with them and file quarterly reports if you have any sales there. (And minimums are often of the form at least $S in sales or T transactions. In many US states T is 100 or 200, so you could end up owing tax on a few dollars total of microtransactions).
Izkata 5y ago
> What I'd prefer, and where browsers could actually play an integral part, is an easier system for online (micro)payments. Want to read this article? Pay €0.05 please. No registration required. Want a monthly subscription? That'll be €5/month, please create an account. HTTP 402 Payment Required It goes back to at least 1999 [0], but as far as I'm aware was never implemented (has been "reserved for future use" until the past few years, where Mozilla now lists it as "experimental technology" [1]). Edit to really fast downvote: I'm not saying this works, but that 1) there is a longstanding mechanism a new feature could be built on, and 2) it's apparently not been worthwhile for over two decades - but it seems it is being looked at now. [0] https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html / https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616 [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402

by elric 5y ago

tzs 5y ago

> What I'd prefer, and where browsers could actually play an integral part, is an easier system for online (micro)payments. Want to read this article? Pay €0.05 please. No registration required. Want a monthly subscription? That'll be €5/month, please create an account. Micropayments are much harder than most people realize. It's not at all hard to design a system that can handle the actual payment part of micropayments. It's the legal environment around micropayments that is hard. A big problem is taxes. If I'm in jurisdiction X and your site is in jurisdiction Y and I pay you for access to an article, X may consider that a sale in X and want you to pay VAT or sales tax. Even if you don't meet the minimum volume requirement that a X has before taxes kick in, many jurisdictions still require you to register with them and file quarterly reports if you have any sales there. (And minimums are often of the form at least $S in sales or T transactions. In many US states T is 100 or 200, so you could end up owing tax on a few dollars total of microtransactions).

Izkata 5y ago

> What I'd prefer, and where browsers could actually play an integral part, is an easier system for online (micro)payments. Want to read this article? Pay €0.05 please. No registration required. Want a monthly subscription? That'll be €5/month, please create an account. HTTP 402 Payment Required It goes back to at least 1999 [0], but as far as I'm aware was never implemented (has been "reserved for future use" until the past few years, where Mozilla now lists it as "experimental technology" [1]). Edit to really fast downvote: I'm not saying this works, but that 1) there is a longstanding mechanism a new feature could be built on, and 2) it's apparently not been worthwhile for over two decades - but it seems it is being looked at now. [0] https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html / https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616 [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402