What’s to suggest I will get the privacy benefits rather than being secretly tracked anyway, especially on sites where my data is worth several dollars per month?
While I won’t miss $5/mo, I’m guessing it would be consumed in the first couple days of the month, possibly leading content creators to optimize to compete for that tiny window of time and switch to ads (or just track full time anyway). Related, when is the meter running? Every time a tab is open on a URL? Only when frontmost, only when being interacted with?
I have come to the sad conclusion that ads are a pretty good match for content payment and any replacement will a hard sell. With ads, I’m paying with my time (and privacy on the web). But I’m already spending my time for the content anyway.
Spending money actually just guarantees you can be tracked, because now you're logging into the same account day after day, and worse you've tied that account to a credit card.
The only way for the average person to browse the web privately is to not pay. Theoretically this might be solved with the right form of digital tokens, but you're going to need anonymous payments (not bitcoin, but monero), and some form of cryptography system that tells the website that you have paid without telling them which person you are that paid. Practically no one does the former, no one does the latter, and the latter would be really difficult to implement if you want to stop people from sharing their accounts with the world at large.
If the web standard was such that the site generated a token (a request for payment) and the browser sent the authorization to pay referencing that token to a centralized authority (that you trusted), then you’d only be being tracked via this method by the group that can already track you by disbursing your funds.
You as the user don't ever give the site a token. The site gives you a token. You then (via the browser) authorize your micropayment platform to pay that token. They pay them. They can track what you're paying (but because they had to pay anyway, that information was already present). The site can't [via this information channel] track you.
You're right, I agree that that could work in the sense of preventing the site tracking me via payment information. I don't think that's as likely a business model as "pay per month", but ok.
It still comes with the previously mentioned problem of the payment provider tracking me. It also comes with the problem that that sounds really latency inducing.
> but because they had to pay anyway, that information was already present
Already since when? When I wasn't paying that information wasn't present.
If you check out the website of Coil, metioned in the article, they suggest a fixed rate of 30 cents an hour or so, until you've passed above your number of hours, then the rate for an hour becomes = CONTRIBUTION/HOURS.
Even if you contribute only $5 per month and browse the internet for 10 hours a day, every day, you'd still be giving over a cent an hour. It's something.
While I won’t miss $5/mo, I’m guessing it would be consumed in the first couple days of the month, possibly leading content creators to optimize to compete for that tiny window of time and switch to ads (or just track full time anyway). Related, when is the meter running? Every time a tab is open on a URL? Only when frontmost, only when being interacted with?
I have come to the sad conclusion that ads are a pretty good match for content payment and any replacement will a hard sell. With ads, I’m paying with my time (and privacy on the web). But I’m already spending my time for the content anyway.