Because I don't want to pay monthly for a bunch of content I probably won't read. I want to pay a small amount of money, with as little friction as possible, for the specific content I want to read now.
"Problem of privacy" which incidentally made me very relieved to find in your article: it is nice not to be alone
> I don’t want or need entities with strong (e.g., credit-card-payment grade) proof of my identity tracking to the paragraph what I’m reading
Maybe once payments are bundled into the browser coupled with some W3 standard…
Make the browser store you credit/debit card info, make the browser handle the payment UI, make the browser expose JS apis to invoke payments and receipt fetching against pluggable payment providers.
My ideal world looks like this. New html button element:
`<pay amount="1.00" currency="USD" reference="my-article-123" checkoutUrl="https://...">Unlock for $1.00</pay>`
Clicking it opens browser checkout flow. The url you get from stripe/paypal or another whitelisted payment provider that has implemented the spec, some flow similar to OAuth. On a successful tx, a signed receipt (something like a jwt) is returned from the provider and saved by the browser, on disk on your computer.
The webpage can then load signed receipt references from the browser api, sends it to the backend which can return the article content if the receipt jwt is valid.
It can be fixed if the right people from Chrome and Stripe got together in a room and brainstormed for a bit. Then everyone else would follow.