Ethical issue [LWN.net]

Ethical issue

Posted May 4, 2009 20:55 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510)
In reply to: Ethical issue by dion
Parent article: Mozilla ponders policy change after Firefox extension battle (ars technica)

by enabling the crappy blinky ads you make it less likely that a proper payment model can be created.

Well, you need to think through what a proper payment model would be. You may have noticed that the iPhone is absolutely packed with DRM. If you want to be billed every time you view a web page, reliably, that's definitely the way to go. But I won't be going with you.

I think it's necessary to take the iPhone app store sales stuff with a grain of salt. I doubt you can really get rich on a whoopie-cushion app.

(Log in to post comments)

Ethical issue

Posted May 5, 2009 18:32 UTC (Tue) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]

Well, the DRM part of iPhones is a nasty little detail that I don't feel should be emulated, but the fact remains that a lot of people are happy to pay $0.99 for silly little apps when given the opportunity.

Now, I'm not claiming that billg would have been well served to go into the whoopie-cushion business*, but I'm fairly certain that more money has been made on one piece of fartware in the app store than on every single ad supported flatulence code in the world.

* But a lot of problems might have been avoided if he had done just that about 30 years ago.

Doing individual payments of less than a dollar by credit card is too inefficient both wrt. usability and the fees involved, but I'd be absolutely tickled to pay a couple of cents per day to read BoingBoing or any of the 20 other rss feeds I read, if only I could do it one payment at a time and I suspect that the vast majority of others would too.

The usability would need to be streamlined to the point where I could tell my browser that it should pay a particular website a certain maximum amount per day without asking me.

It might seem dangerous to put payments on autopilot like that, but we do it all the time, I can turn on my desk lamp right now without entering 23 semirandom numbers.

If websites don't want to serve me content then they are free to ignore my GET request, until then I'll feel quite happy not to spend bandwidth on fetching their ads as well.