Ive seen this abomination batted around every so often as 'the internet that could have been'. Glad it wasn't.

Some of my own critiques.

1. Nelson wanted to institute optional micropayments, like 1 cent or fractions of cents to pay to access content. This would mean that nearly everything would have a paywall.

2. With automated paywalls (to charge and to pay), would lead to scammed content like a infinite scrolling page at 1 cent a page, to not get immediately blocked.

3. The idea was that you could also charge for your content. What would happen is your stuff would get scraped, added to aggregators, and charged more while you get nothing.

4. You pay for seemingly legit content and pay for scams. No way to charge back.

5. With all this micropayments and stuff, would necessitate DRM on all 'pay' content. It would be the only way to stop downloading/archiving/reuploading with micropayments that go to me. I view DRM on everything as a computing hellscape.

6. Nelson's extreme secrecy was what caused his system to never get any traction. Those Mosaic and A-Pachy folks were like 'set up a fresbsd box and make a free website.' None of this goofy money crap.

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cleartext412 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The scraping and reuploading issue could be solved by some kind of universal global content identification system, integrated into the micropayments system, making sure no matter where certain piece of content is uploaded, the fee would still go to the copyright owner, perhaps with some small percent given to the hosting website. Not saying it would certainly work, but there is a few technologies probably everyone here have heard about that seems like a very good fit for the task.

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HexDecOctBin 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This would mean that nearly everything would have a paywall.

Now everything has ads and is SEOed to hell. And everyone used Ad Blockers, so the authors still get nothing.

	▲	mystraline 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ive seen freemium services now, that used to be 'free but ad infested', and 'pay but no ads' - go to 'pay but you still get ads'. I have no reason to think otherwise if Xanadu did the micropayments scam AND ads. And I would expect some online script would necessitate downloading and paying for ads to decrypt the content to enforce paying to get advertised at.

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irusensei 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 1. Nelson wanted to institute optional micropayments, like 1 cent or fractions of cents to pay to access content. This would mean that nearly everything would have a paywall.

Of course there are obvious problems in his ideas but I think micropayments could have been a better monetization option than the ad and data collection model.

	▲	macintux 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Years ago I held out hope Apple could make something work. I'd be happy to pay for content on the web, if I didn't have to have 50 or 500 different subscriptions.

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nothrabannosir 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 1. Nelson wanted to institute optional micropayments, like 1 cent or fractions of cents to pay to access content. This would mean that nearly everything would have a paywall.

Mission accomplished? In real life everything has a paywall. I much prefer a supermarket to the modern internet. I know what I'm getting, I know what I'm paying for it, I can pay cash, and when I walk out it's over. I can see the cost upfront, I can compare different suppliers, I can buy in bulk: I know what I'm getting and what I'm paying.

I hate the "$0" internet.

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mystraline 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you're not seeing the end result of "everything has micro transactions", and how you can't see the content UNTIL you pay.

In a grocery, you can see the goods or the box. Nutrition labels have various details. You see the price. You can pay or not.

With internet of micro transactions, everything would be gamified to eek out as much money for as little content. You'd have content gatekept behind a paywall, with ads you had to download and watch for a password to unlock. Infinite scroller websites are also infinite money generators. Things in the background would attempt to steal from you by silently paying/downloading content underneath they pay threshold.

Every thing would have their hand out demanding money.

And with this, in order to enforce, you'd have onerous DRM baked in everywhere. Lest scrapers aggregate and create multiple pricepoint sites to target micro transaction levels.

And, in this world, only the rich can access everything.

This view of an alternate internet is a hellscape. At least we can block adverts and disable JavaScript.

	▲	throwaway81523 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think Ted had a more optimistic vision than that. More like, go to the library and read whatever you want, but with a meter running so you got charged a microscopic amount per word read. It might come to a couple of bucks equivalent if you spent the whole day reading. At one point (I don't know if he departed from this), you couldn't set your own prices. All paid reading was charged at the same amount per byte. As an author you could freely quote anyone else, like transclude a page of their text into yours. The system tracked the transclusions so the other person would get paid for the part that you quoted, and you'd get paid for your own parts. They basically handwaved the question of unauthorized copying (as opposed to their tracked transclusions), at least for a while, by saying that it wasn't allowed but not explaining how enforcement would work. I knew the Xanadu tech folks pretty well and hung out with them a fair amount. They were capital-L libertarians with the usual belief that they could squash the real world into their ideological framework. I only met Ted himself a couple of times. I think he was less naive, but I don't know how that fit in. I remember RMS meeting them and getting a big talk about all the stuff they'd implemented over N years. Afterwards he said he could write the same thing in a few weeks. He wasn't interested in the paid-everything vision though.