Chrome Engine Devs Experiment With Automatic Browser Micropayments (theregister.com) 146
The Chromium team is prototyping Web Monetization to allow websites to automatically receive micro payments from visitors for their content, bypassing traditional ad or subscription models. The Register reports: Earlier this month, Alexander Surkov, a software engineer at open source consultancy Igalia, announced the Chromium team's intent to prototype Web Monetization, an incubating community specification that would let websites automatically receive payments from online visitors, as opposed to advertisers, via a web browser and a designated payment service.
"Web monetization is a web technology that enables website owners to receive micro payments from users as they interact with their content," Surkov wrote in an explanatory document published last summer. "It provides a way for content creators and website owners to be compensated for their work without relying solely on ads or subscriptions. Notably, Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features -- small payments and no user interaction -- that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web."
"Open Payments API is an open HTTP-based standard created to facilitate micro transactions on the web," wrote Surkov. "It is implemented by a wallet and enables the transfer of funds between two wallets. It leverages fine-grained access grants, based on GNAP (Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol), which gives wallet owners precise control over the permissions granted to applications connected to their wallet." The basic idea is web users will get a digital wallet, provided by Gatehub and Fynbos presently, and web publishers will add a link tag to their site's block formatted like so: . Thereafter, site visitors who have linked their digital wallet to their browser will pay out funds to the requesting publisher, subject to the browser's permissions policy.
"Web monetization is a web technology that enables website owners to receive micro payments from users as they interact with their content," Surkov wrote in an explanatory document published last summer. "It provides a way for content creators and website owners to be compensated for their work without relying solely on ads or subscriptions. Notably, Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features -- small payments and no user interaction -- that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web."
"Open Payments API is an open HTTP-based standard created to facilitate micro transactions on the web," wrote Surkov. "It is implemented by a wallet and enables the transfer of funds between two wallets. It leverages fine-grained access grants, based on GNAP (Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol), which gives wallet owners precise control over the permissions granted to applications connected to their wallet." The basic idea is web users will get a digital wallet, provided by Gatehub and Fynbos presently, and web publishers will add a link tag to their site's block formatted like so: . Thereafter, site visitors who have linked their digital wallet to their browser will pay out funds to the requesting publisher, subject to the browser's permissions policy.
Exploit in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:5, Insightful)
How long from this is enabled until someone figures out how to either get a $100k transfer or a billion transfers in a single second?
Re:Exploit in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as it works and enough clueless people use it. Letting some piece of software spend your money is a _really_ bad idea.
Re:Exploit in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if it isn't hacked its a terrible idea. This is going to make the web suck in a profound way.
Think those 'You appear to be using an adblocker' pop-overs and JS tricks are both common and bad, wait until its 'you have not allowed micro-payments for this domain'
Let's be realistic here given what is being charged for the paywalled news sites, substacks, etc. These guys are generally looking for something on the order of $100/year. So realistically they are not going to make that stuff available and potentially cannibalize their subscription business unless its more on the order of $0.10 an article or something on the assumption you are going read 2-4 things a day. It is going to have to offset the days you're on vacation, holidays, etc when you don't read and the certain revenue for 12 months vs people can leave at any time at least when aggregated over a bunch of would be subscribers.
That is going to set the market rate - other sites will price accordingly. Sites like say this one that don't produce content might price more cheaply but even so its going pour gasoline on the radical corporitization of the web. Imagine you're a student trying to do some research on a topic and looking for other angles/opinions etc. You subscribe to NYT, you know Wikipedia is probably worth a few pennies a view; you could click those search results on reddit.com or slashdot.org but you'd have to enable the micro-payments and pony up however small an amount? Will you? probably not.
The frictionless freedom to simply browse, and explore the web will be replaced with a system where roads are private by default and tollgates are the norm. Nobody will explore off the beaten path. Whenever anyone does because they can't find what they want on the big five domains, they will be rewarded 90% of the time with some automatically generated SEO garbage that wasn't worth $0.005 they paid for it after clicking 'are you sure you want to allow ..." fifteen times, and it will just re-enforce the "don't bother looking elsewhere mentality"
Given the addition of micropayments won't make the ads go away - Its perfectly clear why Google wants to do this. Right now there is a lot of risk with web advertising you end up appearing next to content you'd rather not, if Google can 'fix' that problem without a loss of eyeballs the value of ad impressions only goes up.
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Indeed. Essentially, Google is trying to enshittify the whole web.
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The have been for a long, long time.
And they're largely succeeded.
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Think those 'You appear to be using an adblocker' pop-overs and JS tricks are both common and bad, wait until its 'you have not allowed micro-payments for this domain'
I don't see that it's any different whatsoever. Web sites that are going to do that latter are already doing the former, and are, therefore, literally unreadable already.
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for certain, my point with that was not really that it was going to be somehow worse but that the incentive to do it was only going to be stronger. So its going to be more common and likely more difficult to bypass.
Right now for a many/most of them its as easy as opening the developer tools and deleting to DOM node, or maybe removing a style element attribute. We will see the continued move toward more complex schemese to affirmatively make sure you have displayed that ad or enabled the micropayment before
Re:Exploit in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, the problem is they'll want you to pay before you get to see the content.
And the content will be crap.
All those garbage, link-farmed, SEOed pages that flood google right now? You'll be paying for the privilege of swearing at them.
(if you're stupid enough to sign up for this)
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Even if it isn't hacked its a terrible idea. This is going to make the web suck in a profound way....Let's be realistic here given what is being charged for the paywalled news sites, substacks, etc. These guys are generally looking for something on the order of $100/year. So realistically they are not going to make that stuff available and potentially cannibalize their subscription business unless its more on the order of $0.10 an article or something on the assumption you are going read 2-4 things a day...
If you're correct - and you probably are - then we could see the advent of the "Grey Web". People might use various combinations of dummy accounts, screen shots, and outright hacking to copy stuff from the enshittified 'legitimate' Web to a shadow platform accessible only via TOR and VPN. It would be the equivalent of BitTorrent for regular web content. People might pay, but they'll pay a lot less than they would on the mainstream web, and they'll know how much they're paying and when they're paying it.
Nah,
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As soon as it works and enough clueless people use it. Letting some piece of software spend your money is a _really_ bad idea.
Lets face it, people will get stung by it because they don't think "maybe I shouldn't put my credit card into everything". Instead people think "Oooh, it saves my card number, what fun" and "if there's any problem the bank has my back".
We've long since passed the point where software can secure the finances of the stupid, we need to train people to be less stupid when it comes to money (part of this is letting the dumb lose their money until they learn).
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This x1000.
There will be a hack created for this before it even ships based on RC code.
Then they'll apologize or blame the users for not setting it up right, and "fix" it. Then there will be another hack.
Repeat until removed from code base.
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Never, if the browser follows the spec. It says clearly that the user is in control of how much is spent, and which sites get to request it.
People have been talking about this as an alternative to ads for years. I'd happily contribute to sites like Slashdot where I run an ad blocker. The issue has always been that overheads make microtransactions impossible. You can't send someone a cent or two, because of transaction fees. You also can't send a fraction of a cent.
The spec doesn't say how they fixed that.
Re:Exploit in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It won't be an alternative to ads, it will be an addition to ads.
Plenty of sites disable ads for paying customers.
Why else would people pay?
Do you want 5 cents from someone wanting to read your article or 0.1 cents for an ad impression?
Re:Exploit in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:4, Insightful)
It won't be an alternative to ads, it will be an addition to ads.
Plenty of sites disable ads for paying customers.
It always seems to be a slippery slope. For example, Netflix and, now, Amazon were initially pay w/o ads then they became tiered (a) pay w/ads, (b) pay extra for no ads.
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That wouldn't happen where payments were optional. Most people just wouldn't donate if they were getting ads. (Sure, there are exceptions, but I assume the majority would insist on getting the ad-free UX for their payments.)
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You're amusingly optimistic...
Many people are too lazy to turn off the feature or don't know how. And then complain loudly that all their money is gone.
People that come up with this stuff are NEVER trying to be nice to the end-user. It's about getting money out of people. Plain and simple. If they can get away with it without too many complaints (some complaints are ok), they will do it.
The streaming services are a prime example in the current era. Keep tightening the screws on people. As long as the
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The web is different though, because we have ad blocking. Their choice is between no ads and no ads with microtransactions from people who value their content.
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It won't be an alternative to ads, it will be an addition to ads. That's the steady state, same as cable tv etc.
The old “steady” cable TV now a dying product. Wonder how quickly people will find an alternative to this.
Re:Exploit in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:4, Insightful)
It won't be an alternative to ads, it will be an addition to ads. That's the steady state, same as cable tv etc.
This post violates Alphabet-Mastercard ToS. Unless you delete it in 30 seconds, grovel an appology on all social programs and shut up forever you will be banned from the internet, debanked, and smeared as alt-centrist terrorist, and fired from your job. This is the only and final warning you will receive.
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Fuck. I already spent all my mod points. You are exactly correct that it will all become intertwined and then used against you.
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For most people, this gives government the power to
Re:Exploit in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yesssss, because cross-site scripting exploits have NEVER been a problem before.
Imagining it now; an ad that gets you to authorize a micropayment to it every time you see the ad, which you do on literally every page you go to because it's buried somewhere deep in the code. Facebook tracking, for example? Imagine that. You authorize Facebook and suddenly you've paid them a few hundred dollars just by browsing the web because you are never notified again about HOW MANY TIMES you're paying.
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Maybe you should upgrade to a browser written by competent people...
Is there such a thing? You are more likely to find a Unicorn at your local Walmart.
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It's not like that [reddit.com] would be hard...
It's one of the less weird weirdos you'll encounter at WalMart.
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If only my local Walmart could keep things to only that level of weird.
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In which case why are you posting to Slashdot? There could be malware in the ads, your system could already be compromised!
Surely you don't think your ad blocker is competently written and free from exploits, but not your browser.
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Surely you don't think your ad blocker is competently written and free from exploits, but not your browser.
You are missing some nuance here bro. If Slashdot were to be hostile right now, what would he lose? Some data? If Slashdot were to be hostile and accepted micropayments what would he lose? His financial security?
So some risks are worth taking despite a stronger possibility of a negative outcome because the loss itself is not significant. Losing financial security can be (and frequently is in the USA) a death sentence.
Risk management. Learn it. :)
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I keep the same mentality about passwords. My password for Slashdot is much weaker than the password for my banking account, for example.
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If avoiding exploits was as simple as knowing that something like them is possible programming would be so much easier, wouldn't it? Just disable the bugs and call it a day!
Sadly that's not how it works. If Google has 500 people working on securing the code, the world has 500 million people working to break it.
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And yet Chrome has managed to keep financial details that hundreds of millions of users already entered into it safe. Same thing with all other website permissions, like being able to access your camera or send notifications. No mass exploits have ever been found.
Your assumption is that an exploit is all that is needed, and that is way out of date. With security in layers, multiple exploits are needed. Google has internal teams that are constantly searching for them too.
Besides, it's not mandatory to use th
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Sorry to reply to you again... but Risk management bro. Risk management. Not all things are equal even if they appear to be the same.2 quarters is radically different than a 50 cent piece, and yet, in most situations, we think of them as equivalent.
Try using a vending machine to buy something for 50 cents that accepts quarters when you only have a 50 cent piece.
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> Fortunately the Chrome developers are not complete idiots
No true Scots^H^H^H^H^HDeveloper: Software without active exploits is written by competent developers, until an exploit is found in which case the developers were incompetent.
The best way to avoid an exploit is to not create a system that is so obviously a juicy target. Rolling any kind of payment system directly into the browser so *any website* can initiate a financial transaction with minimal user interaction is just begging for trouble.
And if
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The best way to avoid an exploit is to not create a system that is so obviously a juicy target.
Well it's far too late for that. Chrome already stores passwords and payment cards.
Just let the website operator set up their own storefront and payment processing
Aside from fees making micro transactions infeasible, and the cost of operating such storefronts, it seems like a system built into the browser that hides all the payment and identity details from the recipient (they have no idea who the money came from) is far, far better than entering your credit card and PI into some random website just to send them a few bucks.
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> Well it's far too late for that. Chrome already stores passwords and payment cards.
Sure, but what it doesn't do is automate payments at the browser level. The plan seems to be, currently, to allow websites to initiate transactions with little user involvement beyond initial setup. The entire pitch is that a website can put a line of code in their HTML that will cause the browser to automatically transfer a small amount of money from the visitor's wallet to some other wallet.
Anyone who isn't drunk of te
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Not initiate payments, only get recurring payments at user set intervals and up to a user set limit, after first getting permission.
Any website can ask, but the user is free to decline. Same as they can already ask for permission to send notifications, access your camera etc.
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> Any website can ask, but the user is free to decline
Assuming the user is prompted, which they wouldn't be in the event of an exploit.
"Nothing can go wrong as long as everything goes as expected" is not a valid strategy for anything, especially not IT security.
=Smidge=
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If they had that kind of exploit, it would be better to go after your credit card and bill that. Many people already have their credit card details saved in Chrome.
All your passwords and login cookies too, obviously.
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^W, Smidge204.
Re: Exploit in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... (Score:2)
People here are pathologically opposed to paying for content or seeing ads. Some support BATs (but mostly because the guy was fired for pissing off devs). Normally the response to proposed charges is to threaten to torrent the content--but realistically, who is going to torrent XKCD and Slashdot for their casual browsing?
News sites are becoming paid-content farms. Micro payments are a way to fund local/niche news in a way that makes you the customer rather than the product. This seems like the opposite of
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I suppose there's a slippery slope that you could authorize micro payments in the tens of dollars per month . . .
That wouldn't be so far off the cost of subscribing to a newspaper or two and a handful of magazines, which was normal for a household not so long ago. This feels like a return to a sustainable strategy for funding media consumption.
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The difference with AWS is that Amazon gets all the money with one transaction fee. If you wanted to send a few cents to 10 different websites, there would be 10 different transaction fees.
I suspect that this will require some kind of centralized payment processor, that stores up micro transactions per site until they hit some pay-out threshold. That's unfortunate, but I can't see any other way it can work. Big question is what will the processor's cut be? 30% like they get with apps seems like a lot.
apple will get 30% of your account top up fee and (Score:2)
apple will get 30% of your account top up fee and then each site will have to pay some % to get funds from the top up bank to each site.
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Make payments be bitcoin.
Um..... (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Hard pass.
Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features -- small payments and no user interaction ...
Can't imagine anyone enabling this.
Let me guess... People getting silently ripped off?
Nailed it.
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Can't imagine anyone with some working brain cells enabling this.
FTFY. There are enough people that cannot think.
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Well, you know the old saying about fools and money and parting ways.
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Indeed. And since there are a lot of fools with some money, there are whole industries that cater to them as a major part of their business.
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You use the word "people" very loosely.
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Can't imagine anyone enabling this.
Do you really expect this to remain optional?
If you haven't already, now is an excellent time to switch to Firefox.
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It's already happening on a wide scale, but the transactions aren't very micro. A lot of people use things like Ko-fi and Patreon to take small donations from people who appreciate their work.
If sites could accept payments as small as single cents for content, I'd be happy to set a monthly budget and have the browser distribute it to sites on my allow-list. Slashdot, YouTube creators, some forums I use.
It's handling the payments that is the issue. Payment providers aren't really set up to allow you to pay a
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It's handling the payments that is the issue. Payment providers aren't really set up to allow you to pay a few cents at a time.
Top up your GoogleBux Account so you can spend GoogleCoinz to see the adve... I mean... articles you want to read!
*You cannot purchase in denominations smaller than 12 GoogleBux. GoogleBux expire after 27 days. The cash value of 1 GoogleCoinz is determined by a formula that includes the rate of inflation, the price of a stadium hotdog, and an evil co-efficient of our Dark Lord's design.
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Can't imagine anyone enabling this.
Say for a monthly payment, Google pays the websites and Chrome serves you zero ads on a browser logged with the account. I can see people paying for that.
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Perhaps too much media is being produced. The premise that we 'need' to pay for things is flawed. Why do we need this? No cable, no streaming sites, no subscription and life is just fine.
Absent revenue streams, a lot less would be made. Eventually web advertisers will realize (may have realized already) that the adverts I don't see are the next thing to useless. I don't see the need to insert more money into the machine that makes very little I am actually interested in.
They might consider making stu
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...a proposed standard that allows your visitors to pay an amount of their choosing with little to no user interaction. It enables a website to automatically signal to web browsers that it can accept payments and enables web browsers to facilitate a payment...
Web Monetization doesn’t allow a website to specify a payment amount or currency. It only allows the site to tell the browser it can accept payments. ... your visitor decides whether to make a payment, how much and how often to pay, and in which currency.
Wow, who would have thought, they did the obvious thing and ask users whether and how much to pay.
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Ever tried YouTube Premium? Spotify? Netflix?
No. And nothing you say can convince me to do so. They have nothing I *need*. How do you even find money to pay for that shit? How and why do you have discretionary income? Rent/mortgage, electricity, insurance, etc are all absolutely necessary and the price is going up MUCH faster than pay. Avocado toast.
Metamask scams, except for a wider audience (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh yes, I've been waiting for that (Score:2)
The ability to pay for shitty web content and support shitty content creators. And now that half of it is generated by OpenAI's scourge of a chatbot, it's even more worth paying for!
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A lot of web content is consumable if the price is right, and the right price for most of it is zero. Anything above that price and I stop consuming it. Just like B-movies that you don't mind watching but you'd never pay a cent for in a million years.
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Oh, you just feel entitled to whatever entertainment you want, for free. Got it.
And here we have another moron who refuses to understand words that were spoken. What do you gain out of maliciously misunderstanding the communication given to you? Are you going to profit off of taking his money? If not, then why?
Or do you prefer us to believe that you are merely really fucking stupid?
The ISP should be the wallet provider (Score:2)
I had a think about this some years ago. One entity that can be a reasonable wallet provider for micropayments of this nature is the customer's ISP. They already bill the customer, provide a billing portal and can know where the user requests are coming from.
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Because ISPs are known for their honest and fair billing practices...
Are you mad?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to be able to control IF and WHEN I enter any bank details into my browser , I do not want my ISP extracting money from my account when I inadvertently visit some website that demands a payment!
Even worse some supposedly free website could embed multiple invisible urls in a page that visit sites that then bill you and you don't know about it until some 3 or 4 figure sum vanishes from your bank via your ISP.
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The point you criticize is not related with who is the billing party. It is related with the absence of a cap. But I think they will cap it, otherwise nobody will choose that.
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No, none of that is possible. Your ISP isn't even involved. The proposal is linked in the summary, why not read it?
It clearly states that everything will be under the user's control, including which sites get paid and how much they can get.
I've wanted something like this for years - a way to pay sites I use and enjoy, without risking malware ads and visual distractions. Reward people for their work and keep sites funded, at little risk to myself. No need to muck about with subscriptions or Patreon.
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"The proposal is linked in the summary, why not read it?"
I was replying to the idea in another post. Why not read it?
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I want to be able to control IF and WHEN I enter any bank details into my browser , I do not want my ISP extracting money from my account when I inadvertently visit some website that demands a payment!
Even worse some supposedly free website could embed multiple invisible urls in a page that visit sites that then bill you and you don't know about it until some 3 or 4 figure sum vanishes from your bank via your ISP.
What you need are laws that make that illegal and place the costs on the ISP when they do.
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I want to be able to control IF and WHEN I enter any bank details into my browser
Be careful with Edge then bro. It takes data from other browsers to pre-populate itself with your name, address, phone number, credit card number, etc.
If you have never used Edge but have used your computer for a while, all you have to do is open Edge to see it has all sorts of data about you.
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I use Linux so not an issue. But thanks for the heads up if I ever enter data into a Windows PC.
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I agree with you it is a little less bad if it is managed by the ISP rather than google, because I can choose a trustworthy ISP, but there is no way I can trust Google on this. However, if the advantage for the payment is ad removal, how is the ISP going to filter it? They cannot break https; and they probably don't want to implement per-customer DNS filters (which everyone can do with etc/hosts for free).
Brave rewards / creators (Score:5, Interesting)
Brave had been doing something like this for years
https://brave.com/brave-reward... [brave.com]
(the Creator piece of it)
Like '98 (Score:2)
Ah brings me back.. must have been somewhere between 1995 and 1998 - yes, back in the Netscape/mosaic days - a fellow student at the university tried to get us to invest in a firm making some kind of transaction token system for micropayments. It was before ads like we know them today. There were ads, and "spyware" (which now seems almost benign in how little they tracked, compared to what is default now), In the end, the solution to the "who should pay" problem that was later "solved" by getting everythin
No user interaction. (Score:2)
No. Stop right here, please. EVERY payment should require explicit consent and authorisation.
And the question is... (Score:2)
Will they take 30%?
Look at the failure of Metamask (Score:3)
Could work if ... (Score:2)
... the payment protocol is an open standard, cryptographically safe (obviously) and the default mode is prepaid and fair proportional "time spent" billing and payout.
The crucial problem though is basically a global provider- independent protocol based transaction bank. That's what this boils down to. I've always wondered why Google didn't do something like that a loooong time ago. Don't they have billions of users on android and cheap portable devices? ... This seems so obvious. It can't be that only Elon
Content⦠(Score:2)
Content is where art goes to die.
Another reason I will never use Chrome..... (Score:3)
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There's a nice summary at ContraChrome [contrachrome.com].
The new HTTP (Score:2)
The new Hypertext Transfer Payment protocol, brought to you by the gatekeepers of the new-and-improved “premium” internet, meant for only the finest (read: approved) consumers.
Rest of you detected freeloaders can fuck-route off to the old shitnet.
(Coming soon, because Greed is just that predictable.)
Another reason to avoid chrome (Score:2)
Double edged sword (Score:2)
In one fell protocol the web browser succumbs to the paywall "subscrypto"®
1) GNAP protocol promise is to provide frictionless micropayments creating seamless conscrypton and medium of exchange marketplace
2) micropayments lockdown on the web browser costs free speech stealing a once open and free flow Internet
Its waterfall moment the haves enjoy a private club while have-nots are left in a sea of detritus, fluff and click bait to resemble free speech
And so it continues (Score:2)
people running up an big bill like you can in gpc (Score:2)
people running up an big bill like you can in gpc / aws / etc.
With no default cut off or warring?
What could go wrong? (Score:2)
I see the use case for this. News sites, for example - instead of hitting a paywall, they could just bill you a few cents for each article you read.
However...
- I don't care to hand Google my payment info, for them to automatically use.
- The opportunities for abuse (or just stupidity) are immense. Sure, it's only a few cents to see a web-page. Plus a few cents for each embedded video. And image. And script. Etc...
Payments AND advertisements (Score:2)
Google cannot be trusted with this.
I think it has merrit (Score:2)
Nice idea, don't think it will work (Score:2)
Years ago I played around with this idea for a startup (not the first person to try it, or the last) but eventually dropped it because I don't think the concept can work.
It's a nice idea in theory, replace ads with payments, but there's a few really tough problems.
1) Exploits, it's hard to create a system that websites can't game. You can do things like give users opt-in and opt-out, and website specific limits, etc, but that basically makes the web more annoying and doesn't fully solve the problem.
2) Human
Was there an attack surface? Well, there is NOW. (Score:2)
My expectation is that while I'm writing this, and while you're reading it, scammers are already gearing up to find ways to trick people into enabling t
click now, pay later (Score:2)
So, they convinced me to click. Their web page is useless crap. But they automatically got my $0.30.
You have to either be able to see the merchandise before you buy, or there has to be a painless free return policy. That's even true for articles in places I'm wiling to support, because I'll be damned if I'll give them money for some clickbait article that doesn't deliver on its headline.
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That's the company motto.
Google is a scam.
Heh...
"‘Money before people.' That’s the company motto - engraved right there on the lobby floor. It just looks more heroic in Latin."
-- Veronica Palmer [wikipedia.org] (Portia de Rossi), “Racial Sensitivity,” (S1:E4) Better Off Ted [wikipedia.org]
Re:Do more evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you're going to use Google to look this up and verify this information, right?
Actually no, I'm not going to search Google. If your claims have merit you can provide sources.
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But to answer the question with a question: Why can't you just use "402 Payment Required" like you were supposed to for such content? Why do you need to give them the thing that's valuable first?
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Hey, this is a great way to ensure an entirely paywalled internet for everything.
With Google being the only (or at least one of the few) gatekeeper.