[Paracompact]

How do you explain public utilities? No one has any issue with the fact that flicking a light switch in your home is technically a micropayment, as it consumes extra electricity that comes out in your monthly bill.

I would venture to say that what consumers don't like about micropayments is any combination of the following:

(1) It's a pain in the ass to provide payment info most places, and comes with the looming paranoia that your data is going to be abused;

(2) It's viscerally disgusting when e.g. AAA video game developers expect you not to notice the difference between $100 for marginal extra content, and 100 micropayment charges of $1 for the same amount of marginal extra content;

(3) It's an infohazard to the average person to inform them exactly how much they're spending on each thing in their life, because it tempts them toward a culturally validated budgetary anorexia.

Public utilities avoid (1) because it's a one-time signup with trusted vendors for years of service, they avoid (2) because utilities are priced (somewhat) rationally in nationally standardized ways, and they avoid (3) because utility bills can only get so itemized.

[SauntSolaire]

It's also the incentive structure that's different. E.g. I can choose to buy cheaper LED lights to reduce my electricity costs because the interests of lightbulb companies are mostly orthogonal to the (usage-based) interests of the utility providers.

Micro-payments are more akin to a hypothetical world in which the lightbulb company gets paid via my electricity bill; now they have an incentive to sell incandescents over LEDs. Similar to how micro-payment (and advertising) based news companies have an incentive to sell click-bait, because they're getting paid based on usage rather than a flat fee.

[Paracompact]

This seems like a problem of perverse incentives independent of the medium of micropayment (cash vs. ad farming), no? I suppose the only way around that particular problem would be to decouple their revenue from the number of people actually accessing their content, which as far as I can tell precludes those people being the patrons. Instead the patron would be some larger corporate or public body auditing and funding them based on merit.

Curiously, there are still perverse incentives even in the case of lightbulbs and other consumable goods or technologies: planned obsolescence, delay of technology upgrades, and deliberate backroom deals from associated resource providers.

[SauntSolaire]

Yes! You can partially decouple it through recurring subscriptions, or possibly bundling, such as cable TV. But I can't think of a viable micro-payment method that wouldn't have the same problem.

Planned obsolescence is a failure mode because unit consumption (vs metered consumption) is the monetization scheme. Hypothetically this could be decoupled through something like lifetime warranties, but that has too many failure modes to be broadly viable.

The point is, despite other perverse incentives, with lightbulbs you have a situation in which unit consumption and metered consumption are at odds, so one company can make more money by enabling the customer to spend less elsewhere. Of course, if you ever tie the two together, such that one company profits from metered consumption and controls/profits from the unit -- Inkjet printers with proprietary cartridges come to mind -- you've now adopted an anti-consumer business model.

It's ideal when corporate incentives end up opposed to each other for the benefit of the consumer, but I think you'll be hard pressed to create that through micro-payments.

[8organicbits]

Is usage based billing the same as micropayments? In any case, I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.

[Paracompact]

> I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.

Fair point. I suppose I'm considering the alternative scenario where rather than near-monopoly between utility providers in any given region, there is instead room for competition. I claim that even given such competition, those utility providers who offered usage-based billing would be at least as appealing to the public as flat-fee, usage-independent billing.

> Is usage based billing the same as micropayments?

Technically, I suppose you're paying for a resource which you are then allowed to use as you please. But since the average consumer doesn't have access to huge batteries or water reservoirs in their garage, and since utilities companies don't/can't price you differently per watt or gallon or water depending on which appliance you're using, the effect is identical as if utilities companies were instituting rationally (per unit of resource consumed) priced micropayments on each of your household appliances.

[Gigachad]

For utilities its tolerated because there is a massive difference in cost between servicing different users of different usage patterns. There is no way to have a fixed monthly bill for utilities in a way that is fair. If usage didn't incur such huge costs it would be a fixed bill like internet and phone plans.

While providing extra TV channels costs nothing. Even if you are a power user who watches 10x the TV as a normal person, it doesn't cost the company anything extra.