[wbrendel]

Devil's advocate here. What about all the content producers and services that rely on advertisements for the bulk of their income? I'm afraid the result of this law will be a drop in online advertising, or at least a drastically lower price due to less demographic information about visitors. Less advertising money means more incentive for content producers and service providers to charge users directly, instead of charging advertisers. As much as I value my privacy, I don't want the rest of the web to follow the example set by The New York Times. I realize we'll have to see how things play out, but I don't think my fears are baseless, and I certainly don't think a law is the answer to this problem.

[Silhouette]

It would be nice to think that this will lead to a workable micropayments system. Relying on ad funding has never been a sustainable business model (edit: for the kinds of site you're talking about) if only because ad blockers will eventually kill it.

Rather than trying to prop up a dying business model, we need to develop new ones that do cater to the needs of both consumers and providers. I suggest we try the radical "we make something you find useful, and you pay us a fair price for it" model that I hear was used by a couple of bricks 'n' mortars places with some success. :-)

Edit: I would gladly pay a small flat fee for, say, a month of access to the BBC's web site, provided that this could be done with trivial effort and with decent tools to track my total spend and some sort of simple refund/guarantee policy that works for any site using the system. If that also means I can throw a bone to other sites I value to help with their running costs, I don't have a problem with that either.