What I’d love to see is the government funding and running a way to do microtransactions over HTTPS.
Basically, one of the government’s jobs is to facilitate commerce, which it has done by issuing and regulating currency for centuries, and collecting sales tax. But we’ve moved beyond paper and metal currency. I can’t pay for an article on USA Today with a quarter. So the government should run a system, funded by automatically charged sales tax, that lets me do exactly that. Let me hook up my bank account to it, and say yes or no when a website wants to charge me 25¢ for an article (or however much).
It would be great to have a way that I can pay without a stupid subscription and without giving the website my credit card information. If I read 3 articles a month, I don’t want to pay a $14.99 subscription. But not charging that means news sites can’t survive. Wouldn’t it be great if we could pay for our media easily and news sites could charge for it in a non-exploitative way?
Brave does microtransactions by browsing. Before that, flattr basically did the same. There were apps that charged cents per article, or a few bucks for the entire paper. Subscriptions for multiple papers, to fix the “I’m not paying X for just one newspaper” problem, have also been introduced a few times. This stuff never caught on despite apps giving away discounts with that sweet VC money.
The problem isn’t technological. Most people just don’t want to pay. Some people missed all the different attempts at modernising news, but most people just seem to think paying a few euros per month is to much money for news.
Not all media should be government backed. Government backed news creates a huge conflict of interest.
There should be at least one source of government backed news to provide an alternative to sensationalist news, or course, but if everyone takes money from the government that the readership itself can’t provide, the risk or government interference is too high to trust the news.
My personal primary news source is completely government-funded, but it would be foolish to set up a system where every alternative has an incentive not to report on the government’s failings.
What I’d love to see is the government funding and running a way to do microtransactions over HTTPS.
Basically, one of the government’s jobs is to facilitate commerce, which it has done by issuing and regulating currency for centuries, and collecting sales tax. But we’ve moved beyond paper and metal currency. I can’t pay for an article on USA Today with a quarter. So the government should run a system, funded by automatically charged sales tax, that lets me do exactly that. Let me hook up my bank account to it, and say yes or no when a website wants to charge me 25¢ for an article (or however much).
It would be great to have a way that I can pay without a stupid subscription and without giving the website my credit card information. If I read 3 articles a month, I don’t want to pay a $14.99 subscription. But not charging that means news sites can’t survive. Wouldn’t it be great if we could pay for our media easily and news sites could charge for it in a non-exploitative way?
Brave does microtransactions by browsing. Before that, flattr basically did the same. There were apps that charged cents per article, or a few bucks for the entire paper. Subscriptions for multiple papers, to fix the “I’m not paying X for just one newspaper” problem, have also been introduced a few times. This stuff never caught on despite apps giving away discounts with that sweet VC money.
The problem isn’t technological. Most people just don’t want to pay. Some people missed all the different attempts at modernising news, but most people just seem to think paying a few euros per month is to much money for news.
None of that was backed by the government.
Not all media should be government backed. Government backed news creates a huge conflict of interest.
There should be at least one source of government backed news to provide an alternative to sensationalist news, or course, but if everyone takes money from the government that the readership itself can’t provide, the risk or government interference is too high to trust the news.
My personal primary news source is completely government-funded, but it would be foolish to set up a system where every alternative has an incentive not to report on the government’s failings.