I suspect you're right that people will strongly prefer free over paid, but it's hard to know how many people would pay ten cents for something, because it's not feasible to charge that little. Paypal has a micropayment rate of 5% + five cents (USD), which means if you charge ten cents, you get maybe $0.0045. Plus, you have to do all the billing infrastructure etc.

The economics would be better with a stored balance system, but those are sketchy --- you'd need the balance holder to be someone you trust already; or a credit system where you pay once you've accrued enough content debt to make billing worthwhile, but that's going to be totally scammed.

"Free" is also a very psychologically special price. Micropayments would make it easier to get over the energy barrier to paying for something, but it's still there. Laboratory experiments (and real-world experience) show that people value the difference between a price of 1 cent and 0 cents much more than the difference between 1 cent and 2 cents.

Which is why spreading £10 over thousands of websites is much easier to sell than £0.01 per article. With the later model people become paralised with choice, and the former model has been successful as the backbone for SMS/data infrastructure almost everywhere.

It would be nice if there were a reciprocal subscription model. All subscribers to the NYT can also view articles of the LA Times or some other site, but reciprocal logins are tracked and funds are divided accordingly. That way, with some limits, each site could set their price, offer the bonus of visiting other sites, and there would not be the huge barrier to entry of requiring a massive player to aggregate things and wield power over publishers they don't want to accept. It's basically the model of reciprocal agreements used by the postal services around the world.

It's also the model of internet peering, but it requires an even exchange otherwise the imbalances lead to failure.

As an example, the current dispute where the US is leaving the Universal Postal Union (a month from today) because the exchange is unbalanced due to e-commerce from/to China.

What about your ISP? You already pay them for Internet access, how about adding a "content charge" to that, then have some neutral organization disburse that cash (based on traffic? usage? evenly?) to individual websites who promise no third-party advertising, no tracking, etc.

> Paypal has a micropayment rate of 5% + five cents (USD), which means if you charge ten cents, you get maybe $0.0045.

You're off by a factor of ten here, it would be 4.5 cents, not half a cent.

I certainly am! Unfortunately, it's too late to edit to show what I meant.

Fine. Let Facebook be an order of magnitude more popular then my website. I would still be happy to have 240 million monthly users who pay me 10 cent.

Why would I care that FB has 2.4 Billion monthly users and squeezes more then 10cent out of them via ads? That's none of my business.

You can already do whatever you want on your own site, like a paywall instead of ads, so what’s the issue?

Netflix&Co. are more expensive than bittorrent, and yet the former have gained significant market-share over the latter over the years.

If you want to compete with free you have to offer superior quality and convenience.

And being legal has absolutely nothing to do with it?

That's part of the convenience, no pesky letters.

I don't understand why we don't pass a Terms-of-Use tax. Require every Terms agreement to be filed electronically with the state and the end-user to pay 10 cents for that service. I think we need to force their business model to be non-free, especially when they are making people agree to things that have a monetary cost either explicitly or externally.

> People have decided that paying with their privacy is better for them

The hell we have, there's just no alternative other than not using what have essentially become utilities at this point. I applaud people for whom not having Facebook and Google and WhatsApp is an option, but it's not for me.

I'd gladly pay a large chunk of cash to have those companies not be doing shady shit with my data and showing me adverts, but that's not an option available to me.

People decided that paying nothing is better for them. I don't believe most people are even aware of the privacy implications or how that ties into the scheme of not paying anything. It's kind of like how most people don't really know the economics of Casinos.

Doesn't mean people don't value privacy. Just means that people don't value online services and content.

That may not be true.

I don’t think it’s been well tested, and we should at least try giving people the benefit if the doubt before we give up, in my opinion.