Comments on MicroPayments and the Web

I do not see micropayment schemes gaining any acceptance in the long run.
Here is why...

1)  I expect a few scam artists out there to pull something like with what
has been done with 976 numbers.  Put up something that looks like a "hot
page" and then charge you lots of cash when you hit the site.  (Instead of a
fraction of a cent, a quarter or twenty bucks?)  If they are a heavy web
surfer, the ream of paper needed to find the offending page would be pretty
obnoxious.  Most would just pay the bill.  (Leading to even more scams of
this type.)

2)  If a dialog comes up for each site that wants to ding you for a bit of
money, these sites are going to resemble the pay toilets of the net.  People
will go there if they have to, but avoid them (or crawl under with an old
browser) if they can.

All in all, it just sounds like another scam dreamed up by someone in
marketing to Make Money Fast off the Internet.
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On Tue, 11 Jun 1996, Alan Olsen wrote:

> 2)  If a dialog comes up for each site that wants to ding you for a bit of
> money, these sites are going to resemble the pay toilets of the net.  People
> will go there if they have to, but avoid them (or crawl under with an old
> browser) if they can.

I think it would be interesting to see how copyright law will be applied to the
Web if micropayments ever become popular.  Would memory or disk caching be
considered fair use?  If so, then people could just set up a very large disk
cache and maybe delete it every month or so.  It would also be a pretty neat
hack to use a proxy that only cached pages that charged micropayments.
Companies would not make a lot of money from things like this.  If disk caching
was not considered to be fair use, people would still turn it on anyway.

- -- Mark

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"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with
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