> 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.