Re: Right to Link vs proposed Australian “link fee” legislation

On Saturday 2021-01-16 20:52 +0100, Henry Story wrote:
> Another response is to make it easy for them to deploy micropayments, so that
> users coming from search engines can easily pay per article read, and then
> subscribe if they find themselves reading articles from that paper very often.
> 
> I regularly land on newspapers via search engines, twitter, blogs, …  and these ask me for
> a monthly or yearly subscription which I don’t really want. I can’t possibly subscribe to
> all newspapers I come across, for lack of time. But I would be happy to pay a
> small amount per article read if it were a one click affair and secure.

From a personal perspective I agree that this would be desirable.

But it's worth noting that we're mostly a bunch of high income, high
wealth software engineers, and it's possible that others might not
have the same perspective.

One of the interesting characteristics of advertising-supported
content is that in general, advertising to somebody rich is more
valuable than advertising to somebody poor.  This means that
ad-supported content has rich users essentially paying more than
poor ones who use the same site (although though it doesn't
generally have this characteristic across sites).  Changing this
characteristic might have undesirable or unforseen effects.


(As to the original point in the thread, I am also disturbed by the
apparent implications for the right to link.)

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                        https://dbaron.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)

Received on Saturday, 16 January 2021 20:22:33 UTC