On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Janice Carello <[email protected]>wrote:
> Isn't micropayment the type of system to which one of the internet carriers > is trying to convert: pay per kilobyte of info downloaded? > No, that would just be per-unit billing. Micropayments are usually thought of as being per-use, but in any case, the key thing about them is that they're very small: Small enough that if they were done using conventional payment processing methods, they would cost more to process than is actually being charged. The Wikipedia entry is actually pretty good for our purposes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment The term has a lot of baggage, and gets used to roll up stuff as disparate as Linden Dollars and highway tolls. The general idea is that in order to sell stuff at really small prices, you need a way to reduce the per-transaction cost of processing transactions. The original thinking was that micropayments that were really useful for internet purposes wouldn't fly until it was cost-effective to process payments in increments of 1/10 of one cent or so. If you could do that, then you could put amazingly mundane aspects of life on a fee-for-service basis: Listening to the radio, say. In which case you would indeed probably do it by unit of time or volume. But the original thinking that I remember people talking about was per action or unit of service -- say, sending or receiving one email, engaging one page-view in your browser, awarding one karma-point on a discussion board, teleporting in SL, hitting the return key when you're chatting on AIM, etc. The conceptual thinking that I was aware of, in the late '90s, was that micropayment would permeate everything, and you'd always be paying. The Market would be touching every aspect of your existence and we'd have a perfect popular marketocracy. That's my uncharitable gloss, of course, as though you need to be told ;-). > > I wonder if what Alcia suggested would work something like that: not pay > per minute, perhaps, but per bit/byte of info. You could set up something > like Netflicks but with text: download so much content for a fixed amount > per month from a database of texts. Some premium content (King, Rowling, and > such) would cost more. > Sort of a fee-based library? Hmm.... I think it could work. I hate it, but I think it could work. -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
