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. --- |"The moral PGP Diffie taught Zimmermann unites all| Disclaimer: | | mankind free in one-key-steganography-privacy!" | Ignore the man | |`finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key | behind the keyboard.| | http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ | alano@teleport.com |
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- 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 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= markm@voicenet.com | finger -l for PGP key 0xe3bf2169 http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ | d61734f2800486ae6f79bfeb70f95348 "In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." -- Friedrich Nietzsche -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMcB6ZrZc+sv5siulAQFEKgP/RmelqsXXDaw48s2bIRlmqYdWWt4pMf0s kJTtxLrMuaNq0ROOtlMp8AvEKVpAs/JTPbut004a4TpEeoCShHiXw0G+wV/1etdA qqTTRYiEZqEuhTZriHsz8G0Ia3BNwxeSc5QJ81M1FY4GK/CSVjhb8TM41fBSCKkr blCNM44O9S0= =LJWg -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (2)
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Alan Olsen -
Mark M.