From The Register, February 13:
The team behind Chromium – the open source engine of Google Chrome and other browsers – is working on a way to enable those surfing the web to pay for the stuff they read or watch without any interaction.
Earlier this month, Alexander Surkov, a software engineer at open source consultancy Igalia, announced the Chromium team's intent to prototype Web Monetization, an incubating community specification that would let websites automatically receive payments from online visitors, as opposed to advertisers, via a web browser and a designated payment service.
"Web monetization is a web technology that enables website owners to receive micro payments from users as they interact with their content," Surkov wrote in an explanatory document published last summer.
"It provides a way for content creators and website owners to be compensated for their work without relying solely on ads or subscriptions. Notably, Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features – small payments and no user interaction – that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web."
Small payments, or micropayments, have been developed and implemented in various forms and with varying degrees of success since the internet became a thing in the 1990s. And they were contemplated before that as part of Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu.
Two decades ago there was considerable skepticism they'd ever work. In 1999, cryptocurrency pioneer Nick Szabo argued [PDF] that the mental cost of dealing with tiny transactions usually exceeds or dwarfs the computation cost.
A few years later, in a 2003 paper [PDF], "The Case Against Micropayments," Andrew Odlyzko, presently a professor in the department of School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota, wrote, "Micropayments are the technology of the future, and always will be."
Given the recent history of cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance, blockchains, digital wallets, in-app purchasing, and mainstream payment options like PayPal, Stripe, Venmo, and Zelle, there's certainly no shortage of attempts to prove otherwise. None of these really handle tiny transactions of a few cents very efficiently, however.
- Loose-change payment network Microraiden launches on Ethereum
- Google's gatekeeper to collect toll for dying news orgs
- Wall Street Journal wants your micro-payments
- YouTube and Micropayments
Brave Software in 2017 launched its Basic Attention Token (BAT), which in 2019 became part of its Brave Rewards program as a way to reward web users for viewing ads, have a way to share revenue with publishers. Among 28,000 websites presently participate, according to BuiltWith.
Search startup Mojeek started offering support for Web Monetization in 2021, through Coil, a blogging platform created in 2018 by former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas. And it didn't work, at least for Coil which shut down about a year ago.
But in its farewell note, the startup handed the torch to the Interledger Foundation, which aims to enable Web Monetization via the Interledger Protocol and the Open Payments API.
The way ahead?....
....MUCH MORE
Re Prof. Odlyzko, as noted in the intro to "Isaac Newton, Daniel Defoe and the Dynamics of Financial Bubbles"
The author of this piece, Andrew Odlyzko is something of a polymath. An MIT trained mathematician with an interest in financial history.
And supercomputers.
In "Early Victorian observers would have found our financial markets familiar, but would likely expect a crash" I commented:
We've visited the author of this piece, Professor Andrew Odlyzko a few times, he is something of a polymath. An MIT trained mathematician with an interest in financial history....
That was understating the case.
In addition to his work on the valuation of networks, which gave a much higher (IEEE Spectrum) figure for say, Facebook, and thus saved his followers from embarrassment and loss in contemplated short-sales (ahem) he may be the, or at any rate one of the top experts on the minutiae of the British railway manias (there were two)....
