Responses to Clay Shirky on Micropayments

FrnkMit writes "Others besides Slashdotters have responded to Clay Shirky's latest article on Micropayments, including long-time micropayment booster Scott McCloud and the MIT Technology Review."

Comments

Obligatory PA

[Hamstaus]

Any article mentioning Scott McCloud must of course include the views of two of my favourite philosophers.

(P.S. If you read the news article that goes with it, you'll see that the comic is actually about micropayments.)

Micropayment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nanoprofit!

The problem with standards...

[epsalon]

... is that there's so many to choose from. The problem is all these micropayment systems don't interconnect with eachother. If I were to sign up with BitPass, I would have to pay $3 even though I need it only for a purchase of $0.25 The same goes for any other micropayment system. I think micropayments should be handled in a decentralized way, all the way from your ISP bill to the target vendor, using so-called "micropayment banks" in the process.

Microfraud

[nacturation]

If micropayments ever become ubiquitous, I think we'll start seeing the old "salami slicing" hack again. When a lot of stuff you do online costs a nickel here, a penny there, a dime elsewhere... you can rack of some pretty serious numbers of transactions just browsing around. After all, if loading that New York Times article linked to from Slashdot is only 2 cents, who cares, right?

But perhaps some clever fraudster will see an opportunity here. Wouldn't it be easy to steal 1 cent a month from 1,000,000 people who use micropayments? After all, who's going to notice a line item titled "News article ----- $0.01"? So there's $10,000/month that nobody's really going to miss.

And for a single penny, would most people take the time to make a phone call or write an email to request clarification on where that charge originated? Even if all you make is a pitiful $3.60/hour, that one penny takes a mere 6 seconds to earn, far shorter than the time it would take to investigate. And is the micropayment company going to investigate your 1 cent dispute? Likely they would ignore you or even just automatically refund your penny without much thought.

A missing point

[JanneM]

A point in the MIT piece shows that they do not really understand what they are talking about. They say:

"A micropayment system like BitPass would allow consumers to experiment with new content but also to place their support behind specific artists whose work they find consistently rewarding and interesting. Ultimately, they are paying for only the content they consume--and not shelling out a fixed sum every month."

In other words, they see pay-as-you-go as a benefit to the consumer. Problem is, the consumer does not view it as a benefit; rather the opposite.

A number of studies have shown that people greatly prefer a fixed-cost structure over use-based payment - even when they demonstrably would save significant amounts of money by switching over. People find the need to constantly decide whether a given use is worth the money; and to feel they constantly have to monitor and aveluate their usage spending to be a burden that is disproportionate to the amount of money they would save, even when the amount is quite significant.

I know that the most liberating aspect for me of going for a fixed line, rather than using a modem, was not the speed, but rather the liberation of being online at all times, using it whenever I wanted without worrying about telephone charges (local calls are metered in most of Europe).

So, no, I do not really believe in "micropayments" in the sense they are talking about it here.