Google Chrome will let you send money to your favourite website | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome will let you send money to your favourite website

bleepingcomputer.com

27 pointscomputersuck13 comments

I don't totally understand... users have "complete control" over how much money they send, but payments happen "without interaction by the user"? These things seem contradictory.

From the official spec (still WIP)[0]:

>For example, micropayments of a predetermined monetary value could be "streamed" to the site over time. Alternatively, the user could make one or many discreet "one-off" payment(s) of any arbitrary monetary amount, even while micropayments are simultaneously being streamed.

Also, Flattr[1] tried (and eventually failed) to establish something similar more than 10 years ago.

[0] https://webmonetization.org/specification/#goals

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

I would love to see "pay 0.25$ to read, no registration needed" buttons being normal, but why does this has to be a web browser feature and another Web standard? This could be a payto:// link opening in user's app of choice, a QR code or even a browser plugin.

What we need is an open, universal payment protocol. Only one I know being developed is GNU Taler and hope it succeed. Web Monetization seems like another Google's open washing as sites would expect you to use Chrome and it's payment implementation while making it harder for any new browser to exist.

Since the website gets to specify the payment processor link, I'm very curious to see how Chrome will protect people from malicious websites, how it handles the problem of signing people up to a payment processor, how it will handle informing people that a payment is about to happen, what processor will handle it, how to stop it before it happens, and etc.

The WIP spec (https://webmonetization.org/specification/) is pretty handwavy about all these issues (and, concerningly, is specifying important security mechanisms as SHOULDs rather than MUSTs, but that's a different discussion), which means it's going to be up to Google to decide how these things are dealt with.

Fast forward 5 years: “Google: We decided to shut this service down”

Sick burn I know but just to be clear this isn’t a Google thing but a W3C standard that they are implementing.

Implementing it is one thing. Continue supporting it another

All I get when I try to load this page is a Cloudflare access denied page.

Edit: ironically it was using the Cloudflare warp app that caused this (which I use as a simple way to get around government censorship of websites in this country).

This is actually one of the more important developments of the web platform I think in a long time as it’s the first genuine competitor to advertising and the surveillance capitalism nonsense that brings when it comes to monetisation.

It now becomes a genuinely viable alternative to consider for things like journalism and any other kind of content creation.

I really hope this does succeed as it’s sorely needed.

There will be no competitor to advertising if Google is spearheading the effort. Micropayments have failed because payment processing fees for tiny transactions are too high. Google can subsidize that briefly with its enormous wealth, but eventually they will institute "bundle pricing" aka a subscription. It'll be the same as it was when streaming converged back into cable.

This reminds me of Brave's pitch, with its fancy (crypto)coin.

HTTP 402 Payment Required

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