if there was something like anonymous payments (cryptocoin-based maybe?) then it would be possible without any tracking. In the few cases where you ask your penny cash back because something happened, most companies would just give it back without questions asked assuming they dont get tons of cashback requests from your IP.
That's why they need a log, because there will be cashback requests which people could abuse. And this will not necessarily be only pennies. A penny for a single page, for example, but if you visit many pages of the same site then the amount will be much higher and a user could claim then he has never visited that site and wants his money back.
something similar is happening with ads nowadays. There is tons of fraud in ads and all earnings / payouts are approximate. yet the system works, even approximately. My guess is fraud will be a small percent, certainly tolerable
Seems like there has to be some method to solve this? Maybe the transaction is part of the page load? You don't get the page until you pay via anonymous cryptocurrency. No need for any post-transaction verification and reconciliation? The problem there will be if the page fails to load, how can I safely get a second attempt without creating some kind of "double-spending" problem.
You can do tracking in such a way only the person browsing has a log. In the case of a dispute, the log file can be revealed to the website so they can determine how to resolve the dispute.
In the undisputed case, the website wouldn't see the log.
> if there was something like anonymous payments (cryptocoin-based maybe?) then it would be possible without any tracking
Taxes mess that up. A large number of jurisdictions charge a sales tax or VAT on sales to people in their jurisdiction and require the seller to collect. Some tracking is necessary in order to figure out what the tax is and where to send it.
That tracking doesn't necessarily have to be at the content provider. The service handling the micro-payments could also incorporate tax handling. The buyer would have to give up personal information to the payment service, but they probably already did when funding their micro-payment account.
It could also be handled by having content providers sell through aggregator sites, with the aggregator sites being the seller to the end user as far as taxes are concerned. Then the buyer only has to give up personal information to the aggregator site, instead of every content provider site that they buy an article from.
Aggregator sites would also help with the costs of dealing with taxes. An aggregator would have enough sales in each jurisdiction for the costs of filing to not be excessive. That's not necessarily true when individual content providers sell on their own sites. Some jurisdictions, for example, require tax collection and payment if you have more than 200 transactions in the past year in that jurisdiction, regardless of how low the total dollar amount is. Sell 200 articles for $0.05 and you've earned $10...and will be paying way more than that in quarterly filing fees.
My prediction is that if we move away from the ad model for funding content providers, we will see a big move toward aggregators for all but the major newspapers and magazines. The websites of smaller newspapers and magazines will just be summaries, and when you click to get the full text it will take you to some third-party publisher that the paper has licensed the full article to, and it is from that publisher that you will buy full access.
I think the aggregator market will end up concentrated in a very small number of aggregators that together have pretty much all of the "professional" content on the web, except for a few major newspapers and magazines that are big enough to justify consumers maintaining separate subscriptions just for them.
