This provocatively titled essay makes an important point about the economics of the online media today and its direct, immediate impact on society:
… the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free!
A white supremacist on YouTube will tell you all about race and IQ but if you want to read a careful scholarly refutation, obtaining a legal PDF from the journal publisher would cost you $14.95, a price nobody in their right mind would pay for one article if they can’t get institutional access…
On the other hand, pseudo-scholarhip is easy to find. Right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Hoover Institution, the Mackinac Center, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation pump out slickly-produced policy documents on every subject under the sun.
– The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
In our series on 21st Century Media, we imagined an operation that was reader-funded: “I am confident that people across income and interest segments will pay for something truly useful”. While 21st Century Media would be paywalled, we also sketched the outline of a micropayments system through which readers would frictionlessly pay for every article they read.
However, when it comes to the issue that this essay writer raises, which is widespread access to truth, the micropayments based system gets in the way – unless it’s widely used. Signing up to the micropayments system cannot be too much friction for the visitor who just wants access to that one article important to them at that moment.
This is a challenge, but also an opportunity – a massive one – to create a frictionless, universal, cheap, privacy-first micropayments system.
It’s tough to check all these off at once:
If it needs to be universal, Apple and Google, who have a browser and mobile OS duopoly, are in the best position to create such a system, and would get the most publishers to sign up. But there’d be serious concerns about privacy, particularly with Google.
A privacy-first browser such as Brave has a better shot at addressing privacy concerns, and has attempted to create one such cryptocurrency-based system built in, but the browser itself simply hasn’t gotten enough traction (and there are concerns about privacy among those that do use it.)
For the system to be cheap, it couldn’t use credit cards on file, which Apple and Google have hundreds of millions of, because the transaction costs are too high. Cryptocurrency-based wallets such as the one Brave implements could work, but adoption is an even bigger problem, although one worth solving.
India’s UPI system is widely used within the country, is natively digital, has near-zero transaction costs, but its use reintroduces privacy as a concern.
It’s a problem in the vein of “fast, good and cheap: pick any two”. But the payoff, a payments layer for the internet, is incomprehensibly large.