If we get to the situation where ISPs want people to use their bandwidth because they're getting paid for it, it makes sense for the ISP to give a kick back to the person who hosted the data or was involved in the chain which caused the user to reach that content. We already have many cable subscribers using capped flat-rate services, where there are charges over the capped limit. However I think these caps are typically intended to strongly discourage going over the cap (at least the it would seem so from the charges they levy over the 4GB download cap in my case). I'm not sure of the trends, or the long term outcome but if we do get to the case were people are more metered for service, something useful could be done with strongly anonymous ecash micropayments: the ISPs could pay their network connections to other ISPs per Megabyte. Then as an aspiring content pimp the current day warez, video and music traders could migrate to making big bucks by giving people what they want. The smart content authors / providers would compete. The dumb ones would try to outlaw such things and hopefully lose rather than turning the world into the draconian place it would have to be for their full intent in drafting the DMCA and WIPO offenses. Whether or not artists get money for the works they release depends on how badly people want to pay the lowest price for their content. It's a market fought on price vs availability, scalability (to handle flash crowds), and convenience. Some vendors may offer the claim or proof that they pay some percentage to the author, some may not. The market will decide. The author or original distributer of content chooses his parameters (requested proportion of content redistribution bandwidth costs) to optimise his profits. If he sets it too high, people will have the incentive to save a few cents getting it from warez.com; if he sets it low enough it will be below the threshold for which people are willing to search harder. Adam On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 10:32:05PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
At 2:57 PM -0800 2/26/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
If they can fix micropayments so that I can authorize my web agent to spend up to $5 a month and not pester me about it, they might have something I'd use.
Most people will skip any sites that cost money...unless, maybe, it's a porn site that they specifically want.
There are very, very few pay sites which are surviving, let alone thriving.
The "10 cents to read this dumb page" model is likely to fail.
What I think, or what we think, doesn't make it so. But Cypherpunks should certainly not think of these kinds of micropayments as the holy grail for digital money.
This said, there may someday be _novel_ micropayment applications. Some think newspaper subscriptions (with more or less true representations of page layouts, as a couple of newspapers are proposing) will be this application. I suspect not.
My web agent ought to keep me informed about which of my online habits are expensive and in what degree - but that's maybe a trailing-two-weeks summary about how the budgeted money is being spent, not an "okay to spend half a penny?" dialog every ten seconds on the site.
And there will likely be scams whereby tens of millions of Web surfers find out "two trailing weeks later" that they paid some money for something they didn't want, as when they were redirected to some page and charged automatically before they even knew they were there.
Even with limits on payments--to stop the $135.87 "fee" for landing on www.sexyfun.com by accident or by redirection--there will be angles for grifters and cons to exploit anytime an automated "don't bother me with petty charges" system is used.
Maybe something like a token dispenser radio button. When a page comes up, one "feeds tokens in."
There are a few obvious candidates for "minipayments": software downloads (shareware or commercial), songs and music in some post-Napster world, etc.