Tim Berners-Lee: Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter

SorteKanin@feddit.dk to Technology@lemmy.world – 259 points –
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Have you ever encountered error code 402? Payment Required

That's been part of HTTP since at least 1992. His w3c wanted to make micropayments part of the web. The reason it did not take off is that no one had a use for it. The web was too cheap to meter.

This would be perfect for the current problem of monetizing journalism. I am happy to pay a small fee to read an article. I am not ok subscribing to your entire website that requires an account when I get blasted with unsolicited emails and my data is sold to a 3rd party to pad your profits.

You don't really sound like someone who'd be happy to have a payment system hard-coded into their browser. I don't think it would help, either. Just as with ads you'd be monetizing clickbait and not journalism.

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