Paul Graham wrote on Twitter:

The web is 25 years old, and signing up for and paying for things is still broken. Why do you have to create an account and make up a password? Why do you have to type in a number off a card in your pocket? There is a big opportunity here that will seem obvious in retrospect.

@paulg

To which I wrote the following, a call for a web once again built on open standards and independent commerce:

Compare the amount of money and talent in tracking&advertising systems + heavy web design, compared to in evolving basic components of online life owned business people, not rented from corps: identity, payment, messages, contacts/social graph.

Now as long as you are in a megacorp’s garden of services, all of these experiences work well. No password to be entered. No card number to be read. Often, no address to be specified. It’s all on file.

But since these gardens are proprietary black-boxes overlaid on the open web, every independent seller needs to support hooks into each megacorp’s black-box – it needs to support customers of Apple & Google & Facebook & Microsoft & Amazon.

So instead each merchant rolls their own payments & identity, or rents it from optimised smaller players like Shopify or Squarespace. None of these small/megacorp systems are cross-functional & hence the whole model is broken.

Contrast this, ironically, to tracking & ad delivery. It works wherever you go, cross-device, cross-site, with no sign-in; often through incognito mode & through ad blockers. Seamless and ubiquitous & via brokers, often interoperable. Vastly more sophisticated.

So I n the end the story of the evolution of the web has been one of private capture of attention and data built atop an open commons. Thankfully unlike the physical world, the online one is unlimited. Open commons can be built & adopted any time by any number.

Sellers+buyers, writers+readers can always adopt open, decentralised stds. OpenID. Own domain/hosting of email & contacts. XMPP for messaging. The IETF & EFF & such orgs can learn from megacorps to create simpler to adopt standards for payments & social graphs + others.

In conclusion: @paulg is right. Identity & pmts & much is yet broken. But open standards exist; they must become more elegant/simpler. Sellers will not need to choose between clunky experiences & megacorps’ walled gardens. We can build a better future.