Micropayments are Crap

[nelson@crynwr.com]

Stephan Vladimir Bugaj writes:

 > Setting a micropayment enabled web browser to automatically grant approval to
 > payments of $.02/action may seem reasonable, but it depends on what the vendor
 > has decided constitues an action.  If somone charged $.02/nanosecond for
 > retreiving shareware from an FTP library, and my browser was set to accept this
 > as reasonable based on the fact that it was $.02/action,

You could also set a per-site limit, or a per-minute limit.

 > It took the industry long enough to get PCs and workstations to the
 > speeds they're at today so people could do their own work on their
 > own machines to go back to waiting in a queue for time on a
 > centralized system so you can have the honor of paying someone a
 > lot of money to run your job.  As a programmer, I can see how I
 > could make a fat chunk of change by bilking people through metered
 > software usage, but as a software consumer it seems like a rotten
 > idea.

Oh?  Would you rather pay $5,000 for some vertical piece of software,
or license its use on a $1/hour basis?  Even if you used it every hour
of every workday, that's only $2,000.

 > Looking at micropayments from the (economically) conservative element
 > viewpoint within certain industries make them seem a lot less appealing, as
 > well.  Take television.  If people had to purchase every TV show they
 > watched, there would be a lot less TV production going on because there
 > wouldn't be as much random TV watching.

Um, you *do* purchase every TV show.  On the fly.  30 seconds at a
time.  Of course, some cheap people try to welsh [ see my hostname
before taking offense ] on their payments by Going To The Bathroom
during their payment periods!  Disgraceful, just disgraceful.

 > Both micropayments and data mining require that the user give the vendor a
 > level of trust which most vendors are not willing to repay with similar
 > trust and customer satisfaction.  Customer-users are expected to give
 > vendors greater access to and control over their money and personal
 > information, yet at best they can expect the same poor customer service and
 > bureaucratic attitudes encountered when dealing with traditional
 > transaction processing companies and at worst can expect to be swindled out
 > of piles of money and/or have their
 > privacy violated as a matter of course.

Hmmm...  Sounds like a job for ...  Super-Shameer!  Profit-making
super hacker privacy protector!  His mail flies through remailers with
the greatest of ease, he's invincible to flames, and and he is cute,
too!

-russ <nelson@crynwr.com>    http://www.crynwr.com/~nelson
Crynwr Software   | Crynwr Software sells packet driver support | PGP ok
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