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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.

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Chrome Engine Devs Experiment With Automatic Browser Micropayments

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  • by Calydor ( 739835 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @02:03AM (#64238140)

    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?

    • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @02:34AM (#64238160)

      As soon as it works and enough clueless people use it. Letting some piece of software spend your money is a _really_ bad idea.

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @07:52AM (#64238606) Journal

        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.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Indeed. Essentially, Google is trying to enshittify the whole web.

        • by taustin ( 171655 )

          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.

          • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

            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

        • by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @11:07AM (#64239100) Homepage

          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)

        • 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,

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        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).

    • by Askmum ( 1038780 )
      What is the minimum time I can put on the refresh?
    • 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.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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.

      • by martin-boundary ( 547041 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @04:18AM (#64238280)
        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.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          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?

          • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @04:56AM (#64238340)

            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.

            • by piojo ( 995934 )

              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.)

              • 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

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          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.

        • 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.

        • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @10:23AM (#64238990)

          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.

          • Fuck. I already spent all my mod points. You are exactly correct that it will all become intertwined and then used against you.

            • by sinij ( 911942 )
              The danger of tying payments with web browsing (or even just social media) is in effect an attempt to tie speech to your personal finances. Canadian government already tested this approach on protesters, where non-violent protesters had their bank accounts suspended after government's request . This also coincides with a big push to restrict cash-only transactions (from civil asset forfeiture to anti-money laundering regulation) regardless of the purpose.

              For most people, this gives government the power to
      • by Calydor ( 739835 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @04:29AM (#64238290)

        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.

      • Fixing the transaction fees problem doesn't seem hard. Haven't you ever used a service where you preload some money and pay a few cents a minute or an hour as you use it? AWS, for example, has been doing this for decades, don't they charge storage by GB per hour? You could prepay an amount to your account with a micropayment processor and the micropayment processor will also pay the sites in bulk (say once a day or once they reach a certain amount). This will also address some concern of fraud. If you
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          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.

    • Make payments be bitcoin.

  • Um..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @02:25AM (#64238154)

    No. Hard pass.

    Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features -- small payments and no user interaction ...

    Can't imagine anyone enabling this.

    ... that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web.

    Let me guess... People getting silently ripped off?

    ... let websites automatically receive payments from online visitors,

    Nailed it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Can't imagine anyone with some working brain cells enabling this.

      FTFY. There are enough people that cannot think.

    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      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.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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

      • 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!

        • 1 GoogleBux = 282 GoogleCoinz
        • 1 GoogleCoinz = 0.0336 USD

        *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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by test321 ( 8891681 )

      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.

    • ...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.

  • by PoopMelon ( 10494390 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @02:50AM (#64238182)
    Considering how there already were casea of people getting scammed via metamask using cryptocurency this is probably going to make less tech savvy people do mistakes here as well
  • 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!

    • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      If the content is so shitty, why are you consuming it?
      • 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.

        • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
          Oh, you just feel entitled to whatever entertainment you want, for free. Got it.
          • 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?

  • 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.

    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      Because ISPs are known for their honest and fair billing practices...

    • Are you mad?? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @03:58AM (#64238252) Homepage

      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.

      • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        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.

        • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

          "The proposal is linked in the summary, why not read it?"

          I was replying to the idea in another post. Why not read it?

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        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.

      • 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.

        • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

          I use Linux so not an issue. But thanks for the heads up if I ever enter data into a Windows PC.

    • 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).

  • by rta ( 559125 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @03:44AM (#64238240)

    Brave had been doing something like this for years
    https://brave.com/brave-reward... [brave.com]
    (the Creator piece of it)

  • 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. Stop right here, please. EVERY payment should require explicit consent and authorisation.

  • Will they take 30%?

  • by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @05:54AM (#64238432)
    Which is a crypto payments system, too many scams out there that automatically take everything from your wallet just by clicking on a malicious link, or recently, a security exploit in a malicious ad on sites that bypass ad blockers (common on pirate sites). Also remember those old malicious dialer apps from the 90s that routed your modem through premium rate numbers? Yep that will happen as well.
  • ... 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 is where art goes to die.

  • by bsdetector101 ( 6345122 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @07:11AM (#64238538)
    Could list all the reasons but smart people should know already.
  • 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.)

  • Thanks for the info, hopefully ungoogled-chromium gets more love and popular with chrome users
  • 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

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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...

  • There is no reason to think that payments AND advertisements will be normalized, only with payments you are definitively identified to the website.

    Google cannot be trusted with this.
  • I know this is going against the current, but reporting has value and I'm willing to pay for it. I currently subscribe to the Washington Post and if money were plentiful I'd pay to read the New York Times as well. But every once in a while I want to read an article on the Chicago Tribune, or even some tiny newspaper in rural America. There's just no way that I'm going to sign up for dozens of accounts, and I'm definitely not handing over my credit card information. But what if the Washington Post threw
  • 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

  • I find it difficult to understand why anyone with even a cursory understanding of the contemporary threat environment wouldn't instantly dismiss this idea from any further consideration the moment that it was articulated. All such payment systems divide into two categories: (1) those that have been exploited and (2) those that are going to be exploited.

    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
  • 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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