Micropayments and Internet utilities

In an interview with a Belgian newspaper, one of the founders of the World Wide Web makes the following statements:

• He is opposed to monopolies like Google and Facebook because it is against the philosophy of the open and collaborative web.
• He argues for the idea of micro payments for search results and other web services (like consuming media) as an alternative to advertisement based services (like Google does with its search)

I like the idea of micro payments. I would have no problem with paying for search results, listening to music, watching video's, ... as long as the unit price is low enough (less than one euro cent for a clicked search result).

In an ideal world, a world-wide government would control 'utility' services on the Internet like search, much like national governments operate the electricity,rail and other infrastructure. Micro payments for search results would go directly to the authors of web pages in such a model. Unfortunately, this is utopia.



Dutch version of interview
Google Translate version of interview