Taxes mess that up. A large number of jurisdictions charge a sales tax or VAT on sales to people in their jurisdiction and require the seller to collect. Some tracking is necessary in order to figure out what the tax is and where to send it.
That tracking doesn't necessarily have to be at the content provider. The service handling the micro-payments could also incorporate tax handling. The buyer would have to give up personal information to the payment service, but they probably already did when funding their micro-payment account.
It could also be handled by having content providers sell through aggregator sites, with the aggregator sites being the seller to the end user as far as taxes are concerned. Then the buyer only has to give up personal information to the aggregator site, instead of every content provider site that they buy an article from.
Aggregator sites would also help with the costs of dealing with taxes. An aggregator would have enough sales in each jurisdiction for the costs of filing to not be excessive. That's not necessarily true when individual content providers sell on their own sites. Some jurisdictions, for example, require tax collection and payment if you have more than 200 transactions in the past year in that jurisdiction, regardless of how low the total dollar amount is. Sell 200 articles for $0.05 and you've earned $10...and will be paying way more than that in quarterly filing fees.
My prediction is that if we move away from the ad model for funding content providers, we will see a big move toward aggregators for all but the major newspapers and magazines. The websites of smaller newspapers and magazines will just be summaries, and when you click to get the full text it will take you to some third-party publisher that the paper has licensed the full article to, and it is from that publisher that you will buy full access.
I think the aggregator market will end up concentrated in a very small number of aggregators that together have pretty much all of the "professional" content on the web, except for a few major newspapers and magazines that are big enough to justify consumers maintaining separate subscriptions just for them.
You can do tracking in such a way only the person browsing has a log. In the case of a dispute, the log file can be revealed to the website so they can determine how to resolve the dispute.
In the undisputed case, the website wouldn't see the log.
> Private
> When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed. Just like payments in cash, nobody else can track how you spent your electronic money. However, you obtain a legally valid proof of payment.
Without a proper log payment disputes can't be resolved legally.