HTTP 402 is like Hashcash[1] - greatly underrated and/or unknown, and yet extremely effective in solving its target problem. In 402's case, if it was, say, leg

HTTP 402 is like Hashcash[1] - greatly underrated and/or unknown, and yet extremely effective in solving its target problem. In 402's case, if it was, say, legislated by the government, then the following would happen: (1) Users wouldn't be bait-and-switch'ed by a paywall that revealed part of the content before appearing (2) Companies would need to band together to implement a micropayments framework (3) Lasseiz-faire maximalists wouldn't be able to complain because the only requirement would be that paywalls be signalled by an HTTP status code The only potential downside is that companies might, instead of making a common micropayments API, instead just use Google, or even worse, not use any common platform and instead make consumers sign up for a new account for each site. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash