Simon Willison’s Weblog

Micropayments on the way

24th October 2002

Craig Saila:

In the “Wouldn’t it Be Great” category: Vin Crosbie, in a posting to online-news, says he’s been hearing rumours that next month MasterCard and Visa will start handling small (micro?) transactions online.

I’ve been saying (offline) for a long time that what the web really needs is a micropayment system backed by a huge (and trustworthy) financial company. This could be just the break the micropayment movement needs. I’m still slightly worried by the implementation details; for micropayments to work there needs to be a single-sign-in mechanism of some kind and anything like that is likely to have all kinds of security and privacy concerns. Then again, the Amazon tip-jar / honor box model has been working pretty well since its introduction. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.