On one hand, it’s fun to imagine what a truly full-stack rewrite of the internet would allow us to do, and what it would look like.
On the other hand, the current internet feels like a good approximation of the best trade offs for performance vs. usability in most areas, and I doubt a full rewrite would fundamentally change much about how we use the internet.
An Internet with a payment system built in from the ground up might be one that did not end up throwing its hands in the air and saying “I guess everything will be funded by ads, I dunno”.
An Internet where “keep engagement high so we can serve shitloads of ads” was not the default path to financial success would be an Internet without social media that happily pushes people into ever-more controversial positions, because that’s what keeps them around longer and lets you serve more ads. Decide for yourself what social changes that would create.
Yup, you would pay for websites AND have ads. Given the opportunity to put ads on something, it will get ads on it. That’s just a fact of life. You’re just throwing money away otherwise.
TV sets themselves have ads built in. TVs and other hardware was sold for years at profitable margins, and then some genius realized they could undercut competitors by putting ads in the interface and making money later. After that, it was just a race to the bottom.
Which is why I'm starting to believe there should be regulations preventing this. I have no idea how could they work while avoiding disastrous second-order effects, but what I want to see is for "ad-subsidized" business model to be legally impossible. Along with its cousin, "razor and blades" model. This is on the grounds that these models are customer-hostile, and make it impossible for less exploitative businesses to compete.
I think Kindle has proven that people are fine with paying less for something ad supported. I think the better option is just more businesses giving zealots the option to pay more for the same thing without ads.
I don't know how it worked out on the US market. It worked out well on Polish market, because US Kindle ads were completely irrelevant and thus ignored as visual noise. And also I recall there was a trick to get rid of them and keep the cheaper Kindle.
Netflix and HBO aren’t what I was referring to - I was referring to “real” over-the-air and cable television. Cable is paid for everywhere by channel/package. OTA is paid for in many places in the world through e.g. tv license in the Uk.
Ads still all over.
In contrast to op assuming built in payment would have had replaced ads.
So much this. It’s embarrassing to see otherwise quality-products forced to prostitute themselves to the god of ads. For example, I enjoy Brooklyn 99 like the next guy, but the way their writing bends towards lame product-placement every other episode is really jarring.
Somehow advertisements serve a dual purpose. The other side is the "beat your drum so people can find your great product" mind-set, or, depending on your point of view, the fightclubian impetus to "make them buy shit they don't need"; the other side is the profiling of the users.
If someone goes full-on "modern internet experience" without ad blockers, third party script blockers, cookie blocking, canvas fingerprinting blocking, etc. etc. the dataset collectable from the user behavior is rather large. And this allows for a detailed profile of the user to be built over time.
But what for? Why so much detail? Why so pervasive collection of online behavior and real-life interests? To sell more things to people? It seems like advertising would work just fine with a much coarser scale. Is it something more exotic, like building a "digital twin" of every citizen out there to predict what they will do and how they behave?
Or can it just be the mundane ads?
Anyway, I've wondered those questions and namely why the profiling part must be so pervasive and massive in scale. Can it not work in lower resolution?
PS. The TV-series Colony contains one possible "answer" but although it is an entertaining and paranoid thought, the real-life plausibility of that answer is rather low :)
Such a payment system would need to work for the unbanked (including the underage). That would probably mean accounts that aren't tied to personal IDs, and governments hate that.
As bad as ads and tracking are, they truly enable everyone to use the internet, no matter the background, financial or legal status, age or nationality. In my view, that makes up for all the problems tracking causes.
I don’t think this is really true. We’ve had the technological capability of micropayments for many years (since PayPal probably?), so it’s long been possible to charge for access to content on the web. If that were a model consumers preferred for text, it would be winning. Instead, most consumers will bounce from paywalled content if they can’t figure out a way in for free.
In areas like music and video streaming, paid services are actually popular, because they have a different cost structure and more consumers find it worthwhile to pay to access better content with no ads.
The problem is that most paywalled content wants to charge 50-100x what they would otherwise earn from ads. A typical newspaper would make maybe 10 cents off my visit if I didn't have my ad blocker, but somehow if I want to pay I need to pay a 10 dollars/month subscription even if I only intend to read a handful of articles.
There's nothing preventing a newspaper charging 10$ once to pre-pay your account and each visit debits the equivalent of their ad earnings for that page view. It would negate the impact from payment processing fees while still allowing most people to read in a cost-effective way.
The problem is indeed greed, but I'm not sure the banks are the ones who are greedy here.
> There's nothing preventing a newspaper charging 10$ once to pre-pay your account and each visit debits the equivalent of their ad earnings for that page view.
Sure there is, they'd lose enormous money that way. Because the small segment of users that would pay for the average page view are a large portion of the users most valuable to advertisers.
If they charged high enough to make up for the loss of the demographic willing to pay the price, it would be an even smaller group paying very high prices. And even higher prices once you charged extra to recover the costs of developing and maintaining the separate payment and customer support system and service for that small customer base.
Lots of people that are in demographics more valuable than average see stats about the average a site makes per view (or per MAU, or whatever) and says “I'd be willing to pay more than that.”
What they don't realize is that they are worth more than that as advertising targets, and the people that bring the average down to what it is aren't willing to pay the average.
In this case the solution is regulation that makes targeted advertising unprofitable (like the GDPR) so that advertising is out of the question and payment is the only way to fund the website. Since payment is the only option, there is no more way to price-discriminate based on willingness to pay and they need to keep the prices down to stay competitive. Everyone wins.
Recently I ordered something online using an Apple Pay button, there were no address or payment forms to fill out, just confirm payment.
That was extremely low friction, but would still be too bothersome for a micropayment. If any such model wants to have success, it will need to be completely frictionless, with absolutely no interaction required. And it would need to work automatically everywhere, e.g. built into the ad services themselves. There are attempts (e.g. https://contributor.google.com/v/beta) but that's not quite as easy as it should be.
I think Apple Pay includes the bare minimum friction to determine that you actually want to spend your money. I don’t think any less friction is ethical. I assume the Google program uses a cookie or similar technical means to indicate your membership in the program, which you previously opted-in to paying for through a flow with affirmative consent. That seems like an appropriate solution, and it shows that this model is supported by current browser tech. Websites are free to create their own membership programs, or band together and form cooperative programs, devising any system they like to set prices and divide up the revenues.
For what it’s worth, I make around $20 a month off Brave BAT as a verified creator. It’s largely completely frictionless for people who set the wallet up.
I’m getting spam robocalls that I decline to voicemail. The next thing that happens is a popup with an image of my Mastercard, which I think is an Apple Pay screen, asking me to enter my PIN to pay.
What would happen if I had Apple Pay set to Face ID for confirm?
Is this really an Apple Pay request, or is it a look-alike?
You are absolutely correct. I was told that was the way to send a call to voice mail. I tried the double click, and it popped up Apple Pay, as you said.
I don’t think the level of friction of Apple Pay is too high - below that level you effectively have a subscription, not a micropayment, since you’ve pre-authorised disbursement. I’m no fanboi but Apple Pay is as good as it gets.
Since before. PayPal's forerunners were founded in '98 and' 99. I used micro payments in '93-'94. PayPal was notable for being one of the first new payment systems to get market penetration, but at the time at least it was not considered as micropayments at all, as all of the micropayments platforms of the time (and there were many) were looking at providing capability of paying amounts down to a cent or fractions of cents.
> An Internet with a payment system built in from the ground up
Perhaps there could be a new digital currency for all and any transactions done online. Let's call it ICR. Websites and apps would only accept ICR, and pay out only in ICR, and people would convert between ICR and whatever they want, and that would be the only way to generate ICR, unlike cryptocurrencies and whatnot.
On the other hand, the current internet feels like a good approximation of the best trade offs for performance vs. usability in most areas, and I doubt a full rewrite would fundamentally change much about how we use the internet.