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I'd make payments a prominent, application-native, easy to use feature from Day 1, right down in the network protocol level. 100% of the transaction would be tr

I'd make payments a prominent, application-native, easy to use feature from Day 1, right down in the network protocol level. 100% of the transaction would be transferred from the user to the service owner without a middle-man service taking a cut (payment gateway fees not withstanding). That way there wouldn't be any need to rely on advertising, app stores, or external subscriptions to run something on the internet.

tpmx 5y ago
Observation: That's how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel flourished and then stagnated and ultimately died when facing competition from the more "free" Internet. (Still upvoted you.)
- onion2k 5y ago
  Today I learned. That sounds like a good system. It's a shame it didn't lead to a more payments-oriented internet.
asciimov 5y ago
That would have just made the internet in accessible to the poor. I remember my dad scraping enough money to buy us a computer in '97 with unlimited internet (aol was still selling the internet by the minute back then). As a kid who hardly ever had enough money to buy a comic let alone magazine, and who's local library was lacking, it was life changing being able to just lookup and read about anything for free.
- onion2k 5y ago
  The price of giving free access to everyone has been very high though. We continue to pay with our eroded privacy, personal information that's frequently breached, the cost of advertising that's passed on through product pricing, the cost of giving up so much control of the internet to three or four giant companies, the sheer cost of fighting against advertising in our browsers and so on. We're practically held hostage by advertising - a downturn in ad spending leads to content and publishing companies closing down. The cost of free is strangely expensive. Maybe it would be better to fund more useful things, like sites that give children access to knowledge through direct contributions. Like how Wikipedia is funded.
- topspin 5y ago
  > That would have just made the internet in accessible to the poor. We have that problem now, apparently. Every consent decree that happens to some monster ISP includes a "low cost service for poor people" mandate.
LeonB 5y ago
Ted Nelson envisaged micro-payments as part of the underlying platform (he invented … waves vaguely … all of this)
- dublin 5y ago
  I'm a huge Ted Nelson fan, but what we have is very different from what he's envisioned over the years. (Even Xanadu is very arguably not a single concept - it's evolved significantly over time, and although Ted doesn't miss much, the power and development pace of personal/portable computers and smartphones seems to have surprised even him - we don't see many roadside Xanadu stands with the big flaming X...)
  - LeonB 5y ago
    (Agree, that’s why I only waved vaguely, lol. Ted is full on.)

tpmx 5y ago

Observation: That's how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel flourished and then stagnated and ultimately died when facing competition from the more "free" Internet. (Still upvoted you.)

onion2k 5y ago
Today I learned. That sounds like a good system. It's a shame it didn't lead to a more payments-oriented internet.

asciimov 5y ago

That would have just made the internet in accessible to the poor. I remember my dad scraping enough money to buy us a computer in '97 with unlimited internet (aol was still selling the internet by the minute back then). As a kid who hardly ever had enough money to buy a comic let alone magazine, and who's local library was lacking, it was life changing being able to just lookup and read about anything for free.

onion2k 5y ago
The price of giving free access to everyone has been very high though. We continue to pay with our eroded privacy, personal information that's frequently breached, the cost of advertising that's passed on through product pricing, the cost of giving up so much control of the internet to three or four giant companies, the sheer cost of fighting against advertising in our browsers and so on. We're practically held hostage by advertising - a downturn in ad spending leads to content and publishing companies closing down. The cost of free is strangely expensive. Maybe it would be better to fund more useful things, like sites that give children access to knowledge through direct contributions. Like how Wikipedia is funded.
topspin 5y ago
> That would have just made the internet in accessible to the poor. We have that problem now, apparently. Every consent decree that happens to some monster ISP includes a "low cost service for poor people" mandate.

LeonB 5y ago

Ted Nelson envisaged micro-payments as part of the underlying platform (he invented … waves vaguely … all of this)

dublin 5y ago
I'm a huge Ted Nelson fan, but what we have is very different from what he's envisioned over the years. (Even Xanadu is very arguably not a single concept - it's evolved significantly over time, and although Ted doesn't miss much, the power and development pace of personal/portable computers and smartphones seems to have surprised even him - we don't see many roadside Xanadu stands with the big flaming X...)
- LeonB 5y ago
  (Agree, that’s why I only waved vaguely, lol. Ted is full on.)