Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

Absolutely nothing has changed since the 90s. News should be free. Free with unobtrusive ads if you want pictures and video to help with hosting costs. Stop trying to fiddle with this formula. lite.cnn.com is all we will ever need in terms of getting the message. Mircopayments are not a solution because nothing needs to be fixed.

Yes! You can partially decouple it through recurring subscriptions, or possibly bundling, such as cable TV. But I can't think of a viable micro-payment method that wouldn't have the same problem.

Planned obsolescence is a failure mode because unit consumption (vs metered consumption) is the monetization scheme. Hypothetically this could be decoupled through something like lifetime warranties, but that has too many failure modes to be broadly viable.

The point is, despite other perverse incentives, with lightbulbs you have a situation in which unit consumption and metered consumption are at odds, so one company can make more money by enabling the customer to spend less elsewhere. Of course, if you ever tie the two together, such that one company profits from metered consumption and controls/profits from the unit -- Inkjet printers with proprietary cartridges come to mind -- you've now adopted an anti-consumer business model.

It's ideal when corporate incentives end up opposed to each other for the benefit of the consumer, but I think you'll be hard pressed to create that through micro-payments.

Well, there's OFAC, for one. In the U.S. alphabet soup, that's the Office of Foreign Asset Control, and they maintain the master sanctions list operated by the Federal government. This is a list, that as a matter of law, must be checked against every transaction. If there is a match on the receiving end of funds to a sanctioned individual, the transaction is immediately halted. If a sanctioned party is the originator, a flag may be raised for the institution to deal with otherwise. You do not want to end up on that list, because if you do, the U.S. financial system turns into a roach motel. Assets flow into the custodianship of the service provider, but are unable to move out. A very highly controversial feature to have implemented if I dare say so myself. Then there are the SAR's and CTR's, which are reports that must be filed by banks in the event of "suspicious activity". I.e. structuring, withdrawal of large amounts of cash, etc. They are specifically prohibited from informing you as a customer about these processes.

Then there's the risk department integration. It is mandatory to hand over transaction information on request by law enforcement. The process is mandatory, and continued licensure is conditional on maintaining a program through which financial surveillance can be conducted by the State.

Now, are these features inherently bad? No. Not at first blush. Do they have the potential to become horrifying? Well... Look at what happened to the ICC judge who got added to the sanctioned entities list. It doesn't just effect bank accounts. It involves anything that you engage in a digital transaction to maintain access to. That means entire sectors suddenly go from situation normal, to persona non grata, your business is not welcome here, at threat of massive fines for doing business with a sanctioned entity.

I went into finance looking for a boring, uncontroversial line of work, and came out after a few years realizing the entire sector is so damn wired for power projection it's not even funny. Once you see it and understand how the bounds of what you can do are constrained by these people who are authorized to digitally transact on your behalf... Well... It can't really be unseen.

I imagine that the micropayments system would be facilitated transparently through some popup in the browser, similar to how the browser asks for use of your webcam. I also imagine that some basic, configurable limits would be involved. It would look like "Give news.com ability to request up to 0.10 cents (0.01cents per page load)? Y/N". The first time you load the page.

This is an aside, but in an ideal world, such a mechanism would also be used to reduce fingerprinting! You would have to accept a popup for a page to use features like WebGL, for example.

>Any legitimate financial tool needs a way to roll back fraudulent transactions.

I strongly disagree. I would even say the opposite: the ability to bureaucratically roll-back transactions threatens the legitimacy of money. Specifically, it makes the money non-fungible.

In cryptocurrency, there are transparent multisignature-based escrow systems that allow you to have a defined window of time where the money is co-managed according to certain rules. But transactions need to be able reach a "finalized" state where they are irreversible. Otherwise you just can't ever have a truly secure method of payment between untrustworthy parties and micropayments become useless.

Also, it does not need to be cryptocurrency. Micropayments just need to be efficient, secure, and irreversible. There are other payment systems based on Chaumian cash, (GNU taler being one example) that this could be built on.

FWIW, LWN.net has a form of this, where a subscriber can share a "guest" link for a subscriber-only article (All such articles become open a week later anyhow).

It's bad form to share guest links on aggregators like HN, I don't think LWN has a quota on the number of accesses on Guest links. On the other hand, the occasional widely-shared guest link may bring a few more subscribers, but I doubt this scales.