Google Chrome will join micropayments: this is how it would work

The team behind Chromium (the open source engine on which Chrome, Edge, and many other browsers are based) is working on a new feature: making users pay to access certain content on the web.

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It was Alexander Surkov, software engineer at Igalia, who made public Chromium’s intentions to create a new web monetization prototype. As The Register reports, Surkov explained last summer that monetization would allow website owners to “receive micropayments from users as they interact with their content”.

These payments would allow websites to “be compensated for their work without relying solely on ads or subscriptions.” But how is this idea carried out? According to Surkov, web monetization would be possible through the Open Payments API, an open standard based on HTTP created to facilitate microtransactions on the web.

In summary, visitors would have a digital wallet. From there, those who had linked their digital wallet to the browser would pay the price set by the requesting publisher (the website you are visiting).

As of today, microtransactions still pose some problems in terms of security, costs, and sustainability, for example. However, there are already those who point out that microtransactions will become a very important technology in the near future. Forrester, one of the world’s leading research companies, has already predicted that by 2024 “microtransactions will come out of their niche and become an alternative to subscriptions“.

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