
Ask HN: Paying for content using micropayments at the ISP level? - chm
I&#x27;m envisioning a scheme where consumers pay for the content (news, movies etc) they consume directly at the utility (ISP) level. No throttling of connections is involved.<p>Say your favorite provider strikes a deal with a dozen of good publications. You then have a choice to either keep your old 50$&#x2F;month internet subscription or pay 60$&#x2F;month for a 10$ micropayment credit, all payments handled by the ISP. So you can then browse the NYT, say, until your credit runs out or whatever terms are in effect. I&#x27;d pay for such service, it seems it would be much less of a hassle than handle 10 different subscriptions.<p>The major publications could still rely on advertisement revenue to serve the non-paying consumers, without having to throttle the connections.<p>Of course the devil is in the details, but does such a scheme even make sense?<p><i>Edit: Note that some ISPs are also cable providers and sort of already do this with cable TV. You pay a monthly fee to get access to certain channels.</i>
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wmf
This is called carrier billing and is sometimes used in the mobile market. At
least in the US, ISPs aren't willing to act as bandwidth utilities and you can
bet they would also attempt to treat payments as a strategic competitive
weapon. And then you have all the usual unsolved problems with micropayments
(mental transaction costs vs. stealing etc.).

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chm
Thank you for the reply, I hadn't noticed.

My point of view is that I don't care being tracked, _as long as I 'm paying
for said tracking_. I browse the web with NoScript, Ghostery, uBlock, AdBlock
etc because I don't want to be used as a product without my consent.

But I'd gladly pay 10-20$ more per month to my ISP for access to quality
journalism, where payments are arranged for by my ISP through some tracking
cookie or whatever.

