> And it is the western corporates that have deliberately created this anti-competitive business model.

You sure it's not the same cheap consumers that cause race-to-the-bottom business models in a lot of other industries too (airlines)?

You are right. Consumers bear some of the blame. At the same time, many options are outright unattainable due to legislative capture in the financial industry.

Right now the only way to charge the average consumer is through their debit or credit card. This makes micro transactions through the web infeasible.

Imagine a world where there weren't such massive legislative moats and selective enforcement in favor of big financial players and against the small.

Personally I believe if setting up the competetion to MasterCard/Visa weren't made virtually impossible via legislation, we'd see many card with transactions fees of $0.000X instead of $0.xx/transaction + Y%/transaction + minimums.

I think consumers would be much more ok with paying for reading a news article at $0.01/read. But alas, such options aren't on the table. I do concede it's hard to prove the reason for current transaction fees is what I attributed in my post, but there is evidence for it.

I also think that the way money is created an placed into the system could be done in a way that created more smaller competitors instead of such large pools of capital, which can more easily try and engage in anti competitive behavior.

> I think consumers would be much more ok with paying for reading a news article at $0.01/read. But alas, such options aren't on the table. I do concede it's hard to prove the reason for current transaction fees is what I attributed in my post, but there is evidence for it.

I think you'll find that very few people are willing to engage in any degree of per article mental gymnastics to read a news article, and will instead be very very selective about what they read, with ruinous effects for local news.

If Spotify was not $9.99 flat fee you would likely not happily leave it on all night or use it as background music for fear of what it was costing. The difference between the way people used metered and unmetered internet was huge. Charging any kind of fee on a per article basis would have profound impacts on the way people consume media.

This is said a lot, very confidently, yet I wonder. Water, gas, and power are basically microtransactions on this model, for many people. Most people don't worry about mental accounting when they turn the tap. How sure are we really that this isn't just something that hasn't worked on a large scale for information yet?

Such a model could even have a cap: It's $0.001/article up to $20/month. Like... cell phone data use? But without having to sign contracts or pre-payment.

If only a few of the paywall newspapers would implement a direct per article fee, even at $0.10-0.50 I would pay for many articles because I'm too lazy and don't want to pull up a javascript disabled google cache version of the page or fire up a VM... or any of the other techniques SWIM would use to get around paywalls.

Great point re: the oftentimes unseen injustice of financial tyranny. Have you heard of Stellar (https://www.stellar.org)? I don't have any experience actually using them and not sure if the blockchain is the correct way to go, but in principle their idea of a federated network for exchanging any unit the parties agree upon is a good one.

Stellar charges 0.00001 lumens per transaction, but it has no network effect and low usage.

capitalism, by its nature, will optimize all products to the level of 'just bearable'. Look at airplane seating.