Web Monetization | Hacker News Reader

Web Monetization

webmonetization.org

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As usual there seem to be fragmented efforts going on. Does anybody here know what's the difference between these two?

* https://webmonetization.org/specification.html

"Web Monetization is an API that allows websites to request small payments from users facilitated by the browser and the user's Web Monetization provider."

* https://www.w3.org/TR/webpayments-overview/

" ? "

Those two efforts address different use cases.

Web Monetization is an API for websites that wish to accept a stream of small micropayments as long as the user is on the site. This suits pay-as-you-use content and service models and is a good substitute for advertising revenue as it's passive (no user interaction required).

Web Payments (there are two APIs: https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/ and https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-handler/) are discreet payments requested by the website and explicitly authorised by the user. These are best suited to use cases like ecommerce, donations etc.

nice! I think these paragraphs should be added to the top of both sites :-)

That is not fragmentation, even it appears that way. Adrian Hope-Bailie who is part of the web payments working group is also involved in the web monetization spec. WebMo is attempting to align completely with the web payments work.

Disclaimer: Work for Coil

Fragmented because nobody seems to have found a winning UX yet. Once there is a strong and growing set of users that are happily paying for content on a small set of websites, I believe we will see more consolidation.

Given the choice, most people won't pay for anything, at all, ever.

That's just the culture, we can change it. I had the privilege to explain to someone the donation model. wwwwhy would I pay for a free font??? Do people really do this????

edit: When people know a waitress is not- or barely getting paid they are far less likely to not give a tip. We are not alien to the concept.

Won't - or can not afford... Too many low-paying jobs and unemployed people.

If anyone involved with this stops by, could you clarify how Interledger, Coil, and Ripple are related, if at all? It seems like this (Web Monetization) is an attempt to make a w3c standard around browsers initiating transactions out of fintech accounts that support Interledger (a protocol developed by Ripple for moving currency from one ledger to another using escrow) developed by Coil (a micropayments platform), but I might be missing something...

My understanding is that Interledger is the backend which Coil uses to send payments. Interledger is able to use multiple currencies, ranging from crypto to fiat. Ripple is mostly just building the infrastructure for it, enabling growth in the crypto ecosystem.

I think, for them, the payoff would be that using XRP is be the cheapest solution in the end, which would make it interesting. Also quite important, they also directly benefit from there being more entries in all orderbooks, since their software will be more efficient (ODL, on-demand liquidity). They have a benefit for the entire (all cryptos) ecosystem to thrive.

This is a pretty good summary.

Interledger (interledger.org) is a protocol stack and a network. The network consists of a number of companies that have setup arrangements to settle payments between them via different payment rails and implemented the Interledger protocol to make those payments.

The Interledger network is used to send payments between these companies consisting of millions of tiny packets (each worth nano-cents) allowing for very small amounts to be sent at close to zero cost.

Coil is one of the companies using the Interledger network as it is perfect for our use case of Web Monetization (which is only viable on a payment network that allows very small payments without a fixed fee).

We originally developed the Interledger protocol at Ripple and there are still folks at Ripple that participate in the community. I think Ripple's incentive for seeing Interledger succeed are well described above.

I am rooting for this, but I have a hard time understanding how it can gain mass acceptance.

Coil [0] is also an interesting app built on top of the Web Monetization API.

[0] https://coil.com/

Chris_f I would love someone on our team to talk to you. We are attempting to solve those pain points by working with partners like you. Email me matt at coil domain

I'm wondering where telcos and ISPs stand in this context. I mean, given almost everybody owns a mobile, and telcos already have your details and payment data anyway, it's surprising that no telco-backed payment solution has emerged (except for maybe mpesa in Africa), when telcos are already part of a highly regulated market (in EU at least) and could be further regulated to provide payments in a non-discriminatory way to the benefit of both the telco and the user. In the 1990s, downloadable ringtones with anonymous payments via special phone numbers were widely used, making use of MMS which has an option to request paid content where the UI asks you if you want to accept the paid content. What's the reason for this not taking off? Is it that previous efforts were failures, or that Telcos were too greedy or what? Or was it ruined by Google and Apple who'd rather want you to consume their ads or paid media offerings?

I would absolutely say that telcos were too greedy, and that the history of the Internet is exploiting the fact that the Internet doesn't have a billing system to undercut telcos at every opportunity.

The Internet has undercut voice, text, ""online services"" (Compuserve and AOL etc), news, and most recently cable TV. The only way those prices can be lifted off the zero floor again is by a monopoly somehow squeezing out the free alternatives.

The psychological overhead of billing should not be underestimated as a reason against micropayments. Not having to think about your usage is liberating. This is why bundling (e.g. Netflix, Prime) is not going away.

Content creators do sometimes need to be paid somehow to produce content (although lots will do it for free!), and people seem to be slowly converging on Patreon/Kickstarter for this.

Since the early 90's I've argued that banks should join forces and make a phone or at least a chip for a phone. I talk with a few banking people not to low on their food chain but they didn't understand it at all:

Phone companies are doing transactions per second which requires them to replicate a bank. It might be that you can only buy one thing today (calls) prepaid phones are ordinary bank accounts and phone contracts are credit cards. Where do you, as a banker, think this is going to go eventually? To add to this insanity [I added], you have a 0.50 cent per minute help line. You are already using their bank to sell support to your customers. Hundreds of guilders are transferred per person from your accounts to your competitor every month! Compare the service level: If I don't use the phone often enough they steal my money and close my account!

Over the many years that followed I got properly robbed by phone companies multiple times and hear at least 30 crazy stories from people I know. Schemes not even the greediest banker could dream up. They would go to prison fast.

This is effectively M-PESA.

As usual, the incumbents don't care and have ossified structures and a poor understanding of technology. Banks, in particular, care least about the bank accounts - they're almost a loss leader to get people in for the real business, which is loans, especially mortgages.

Right, but we take a mortgage with them because we already use their other services. 10 cent funeral insurance is a gold mine. I suppose they will stay ignorant until some random tech giant lets you buy the house from the street and unlock the door while drones fly in your belongings.

There's a "Use <MY_MOBILE_NETWORK> billing" option in the Google Play App's Payment Method settings on my Android phone. I'm in the UK. (I haven't used it so I don't know how it works)

In the US, it puts the charge on your phone bill and makes it near impossible to contest or get a refund when things go wrong, because dealing with phone companies is usually way more painful than dealing with a credit card company or even a bank.

In the US, you shouldn't ever use this - you should just use a credit card instead.

In the UK everyone uses debit cards, so I'm not sure if this recommendation is still valid. In the US, using a debit card is possibly the only thing you could do that's worse than "bill my mobile carrier."

Hm that's an interesting US perspective that was new to me. I still maintain that establishing a non-monopolistic payment system is vital (similar to having a currency in the first place) and that, for us in the EU at least, telcos are reasonably competitive and on the regulatory hook anyway and thus best equipped to become payment providers.

Because telcos and ISPs have a reputation for comically bad UX?

I buy 1 GB data a month ago for my prepaid phone for 10 euro. I thought 1 GB isn't much so I buy another one. Turns out you can only top it off to 1 GB. I thought meh.. then I got an SMS message announcing it would expire after 30 days. I dunno, you could put that kind of stuff above the form?

1GB for 10EUR on a prepaid in EU is way too much. In Germany, the price is about one tenth that (7-8GB for 9EUR) and that's supposedly already a high-price region when it comes to phone rates as they say. I believe in other parts of Europe (Lithuania, Estonia?) you can get up to 40GB LTE for 10EUR.

I've worked for telcos, and postpaid is indeed very much about "buying customers" via deals/sales prediction models and customer retention; they kindof have to do this, else they simply wouldn't exist in the marketplace. But for prepaid, OTOH, I can't see anything wrong with the prices (ok you don't get a sponsored spyware device every other year).

Can someone explain how this might me made resistant to payment blockades erected by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and the like?

Great question. For low value payments those payment rails are incredibly expensive. That’s why it operates on the Interledger network.

Interledger is a payments clearing protocol modeled on IP where settlement is arranged through peering relationships. It is incredible good at low value payments.

Our next work in the space is beginning to open it up to Retail style payments through Open Payments[1]. Initially we are targeting mini payments (<$5). As these are poorly served currently with traditional options due to high fees.

However our final goal is much bigger. The real problem we see in digital payments is not MasterCard, Visa and PayPal but Apple, Google and Facebook. We had OpenId but we ended up only getting login with Apple, Facebook and Google. The same is going for payments. We believe Open Payments is a viable alternative to provide an open payments system that is not big tech.

[1] openpayments.dev

> Can someone explain how this might me made resistant to payment blockades erected by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and the like?

I'm kind of surprised nobody has automated using cryptocurrency for this.

It's possible to buy e.g. Bitcoin with a credit card from a hundred places (right?), so somebody creates a website that takes the user's credit card info, passes it through to any Bitcoin seller and then receives the Bitcoin and transfers the value to the target. From the user's perspective they just paid the target with a credit card.

The party actually charging the credit card is the Bitcoin seller, who isn't affiliated with the proxy transaction at all and could be transparently swapped out for anyone who sells cryptocurrency and accepts credit cards without the seller even being aware of the indirection.

You could presumably do the same thing with any asset whatsoever. The user gets a charge on their card for gold bullion or baseball cards, which get shipped to the payment exchange and then liquidated again with the proceeds going to the target. But that's probably just unnecessary overhead compared to using cryptocurrency.

If there are laws against this in some countries, the site itself would only be glue code running on a webserver, so couldn't it just be located in any place where doing this is legal?

I've pondered variations of this many times. If you ignore complexity some truly fascinating formulas can be had. You can for example create tons of value out of thin air by having traders express an interest in items if they are sold below x. A baseball card could have an infinite number of partial owners and automatically change "hands". Some just want to trade them and are not interested in physically holding onto them (if not worried) while others just want to stick the postal stamps in books and show off. If you are for whatever reason unable to send it to the new 51% owner on his request you automatically refund the entire item at market value.

> somebody creates a website that takes the user's credit card info, passes it through to any Bitcoin seller and then receives the Bitcoin and transfers the value to the target

Two things go wrong:

- credit transactions are reversible and bitcoin isn't, so the middle party gets stiffed by fraud

- you have to have a merchant account to take credit payments, and the networks will blacklist you if you do things like this

> credit transactions are reversible and bitcoin isn't, so the middle party gets stiffed by fraud

So they hold the Bitcoin in escrow until the reversibility period has expired. Also, this is presumably what the independent Bitcoin seller has to do anyway, because it's their problem rather than the middle man's.

> you have to have a merchant account to take credit payments, and the networks will blacklist you if you do things like this

But the middle party isn't taking credit card payments -- that's the point. They're just forwarding the user's credit card info to any unaffiliated third party who sells Bitcoin and accepts credit cards, and then giving the Bitcoin to the target. They're not really a payment processor at all, they're just a process automation website for doing a multi-step transaction in one step to reduce friction. (Though they are in a perfect position to take a small cut to cover their costs.)

That's what Interledger is trying to set up: https://interledger.org/overview.html

What are those?

It’s when all major payment processors collude to prevent money from reaching certain businesses. Since they’re essentially a small set of players constituting a duopoly (Visa and MasterCard) or oligopoly once you pull in the other players, there’s not much you can do about it. Their power constitutes a threat to freedom of speech, since they’re also commonly targeted by activists to “deplatform” those they disagree with.

The big example is when the credit card companies blocked Wikileaks in 2010: https://www.rawstory.com/2010/12/mastercard-visa-licenses-re...

A more recent example from 2020: https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in-am...

Things like "Operation Choke Point", I assume. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Beyond that, if a major payment provider doesn't like you, you're basically sunk. Horror stories about businesses withering while their PayPal accounts are frozen are almost as old as the WWW itself.

Not to mention some business models are just outright not possible because of the payment gateway mafia.

If you're in the adult business, you pay extortionate fees irrespective of your fraud rate.

If you're in legal businesses that are illegal in some areas, you might not be able to transact at all -- even in the legal areas.

If your business does not adhere to all US laws and regulation, despite the fact that you do not do business in the US, you are probably out of luck.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/square-canada-1.53031...

Can someone explain how with web monetization we won't have microtransactions on the Internet as we do with games? i.e. I don't want to pay per article read, as that would take away from the unlimited nature of the internet, where for a flat fee to my ISP, I can read/watch/listen to whatever I want.

That is a great question and partly why there is valuing in having a Web Monetization Provider such as Coil. The job of the provider is to optimize and distribute the spend in a way that gives you the best experience. There is still much to be explored here but the basic premise is that the Provider basically makes micro-decisions for you so you don't have to.

So now I pay the ISP as well as a third party? Seems excessive, it's like streaming services all over again. Some content will be gated behind one provider, and others behind another.

Without a concise and fact-based description of what constitutes "corrupt business models", I think they ought to avoid mentioning "corruption" entirely; it does not really serve a useful purpose.

That is fair feedback, thanks. Will raise an issue in the repo.

It is relative easy to ask developers to implement ways to charge users; how accessible is it to the end users?

The only icon I recognized was Angular on the page.

I feel though a standard of sending money is a little too similar for paying a vendor. I'd personally prefer companies to handle this than a recommendation, because who is to say my payment details are saved and then a malicious script sends the bad actor my money?

No thanks

Does Brave implement this? LOL

No. Although it would be great if they did.

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