Slashdot Mirror
Micropayments For News — Holy Grail Or Delusion?
newscloud writes "Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab sounds off on micropayments for news content, on the side of the argument that says they are a dangerous delusion: 'What does it mean for journalism? It could mean charging for different platforms, for early alerts, for special members-only access to certain premium or value-added content. But I'm pretty sure of one thing: It doesn't mean charging people fractions of a cent to read a news story, no matter how sophisticated the process.' The article provides good context on the debate over micropayments from a 2003 piece by Clay Shirky, to recent analysis and opinion by Masnick, Outing, Graham, and Reifman. Google's micropayment plans were recently discussed here."
If they don't accept anonymous payments I won't pay for the content regardless of how good it is. The technology for anonymous electronic cash has been around for more than a decade. If a vendor wants my money they had better respect my privacy.
The fun thing is that this is mainly a US problem. For example in Russia the most used payment method is WebMoney, where you define exactly what information is public about your account and *by default* everything is private. All the information other party sees is the "purse number" of yours, ie. Z435903486439 or similar.
And you can pay for pretty much every service with it, from buying credit to your mobile phone to doing online purchases. You can also get credit card that is linked to your account. And the system is a lot more secure than PayPal too, with possibility to use keyfiles and sms verification for transactions along others. And theres none of such cases where PayPal just decides to lock out the user account. It is actually your account.
Sometimes its funny how much US is lacking behind on some things.