[microcurrency]
It will also not catch on until there are better standards involving microcurrency transactions amongst the vendors. It would also help if there was a single interface (or "helper app") for whatever vendor you decided to go with.
as I see it, I think there are a few key standards that need to be devised: 1. an html tag that indicates how much a link costs, probably in the <a href="" cost=xx> type syntax 2. modification of http to support a payment mechanism, by sending a token. 3. browser "piggy bank". there are other standards, such as how a person might get cash into their piggy bank etc., but most would be related to the above items. notice that we don't really need a good interoperable standard to begin with. often Netscape and MS invent tags that are not interoperable between them, and later standardization arrives at a consensus / convergence. as I see it, I think the browser manufacturers should just pick their favorite digital cash scheme (cybercash, digicash, whatever) that is easiest to implement, and do so, with the intention of integrating other schemes at a later date.
Currently every vendor of payment schemes has made it proprietary in some way. (At least the ones I have seen.) This means that if the user visits three different web pages, each using a payment scheme from a different vendor, that user has to be signed up with all of those vendors. (Or at least have their helper apps.)
hence, a good opportunity for the browser manufacturer to remove all these additional complications and make it point-and-click simple. I agree, this is not going to be a total nonbrainer. but better the browser manufacturer do it for their software, allowing everyone who uses it to benefit, than every single cash user in cyberspace trying to replicate the same difficult series of steps to get their cash going.
I will not even go into the hastles of trying to set it up from the server side. (The last payment scheme I installed (cybercash) was not very well documented. The documentation on the web site contradicted the software with the tar file. (And both were wrong at some point.)) Until these payment schemes are easier to deal with for the web page provider, they will not catch on. (There will also need to be more support for Internet service providers with multiple vendors all on different payment schemes.)
Until there is a single standard hammered out, micropayments will still be few and far between.
generally, that's what I'm calling for, some ad hoc standards being put into place immediately by the browser manufacturers, in the same way new tags are always being invented. standardization generally results *after* an initial, minimally constrained innovation phase, imho.