The Interledger Community 🌱: Exploring the future of Web Monetization

Exploring the future of web monetization — Final Grant Report

Stephanie Rieger — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 22:03:52 +0000

Project Update

It's been an exciting couple of months for the project. I received great feedback and have had many interesting conversations.

The most recent was an invitation to discuss my paper on Getting Tech Right, a podcast by German tech advisor Peter Bihr and Canadian researcher and curator Patrick Tanguay that explores issues around how technology shapes our society and how to think about these issues better.

The conversation was good fun and touched on many topics including web monetization, tech policy, and capitalism :)

You can listen to it here.

Progress on key activities and objectives

My project set out to "combine research, strategic insight, and ethical speculation to explore the potential long-term impacts of the Web Monetization and Interledger protocols."

The paper I released accomplishes this in two key ways:

Using fiction to explore three potential futures, each using a different business model as a lens to explore the paths these technology may take, and how the resulting ecosystem could impact the relationship between providers, publishers, and their users.
An exploration of key challenges with today's vision web monetization, and recommendations aimed at creating more positive outcomes for users, and the open web. Themes in this section include privacy, interoperability and transparency, creator and publisher agency, and mitigating harm.

Based on the above, I feel confident that all project objectives have been met. The white paper, published in March 2021, will remain available to read online, and to download as an ebook.

Communications and marketing

I primarily promoted the project through Twitter, which is where most of my network resides. An unexpected perk of posting updates on the platform was that several people volunteered to review early drafts of the paper. Thanks again to everyone who generously shared their time and ideas!

I was also introduced to the FairPay initiative, a framework that seeks to unlock an ecosystem of value, by encouraging fairness and dialogue amongst participants. If you found my paper interesting, I would encourage you to also give FairPay a read.

What’s next?

This will be my final report for the project…at least for the purposes of the grant period, which has now ended.

I plan to take a break for the summer, but hope to continue promoting the paper in the autumn! I will also be attending Coil's upcoming Web Monetization workshop. The lineup looks great and I hope to see some of you there!

It's been a great ride and i'd like to thank Grant for the Web for this unique opportunity to share my ideas, and contribute to the future of a more open web.

Steph

Three futures: A whitepaper that explores the future of web monetization

Stephanie Rieger — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 21:07:10 +0000

Welcome to the future. It’s 2030…

You’re surfing the web and come across an interesting website. Perhaps it contains a collection of gluten-free recipes or a unique multi-episode knitting course, or maybe it’s a community for people learning to speak Spanish. Now imagine being able to easily send its creator money as a token of your appreciation. Rather than subscribe to that site specifically, you use a service that automatically streams tiny payments as you browse. The donations you make are paid in real-time to that creator’s digital wallet, and they may choose to reward you with a thank you message or small piece of bonus content.

This is the vision proposed by the creators of Web Monetization, an API and proposed web standard that enables users to stream tiny payments to websites as they browse the web. In exchange for this payment, websites can provide the user with a “premium” experience such as free access to exclusive content or removing advertising. All of this is made possible by Interledger, an open protocol that applies many of the principles of network design, to payments.

Why this paper?

With more than half the planet now online, and so many of us relying on the web for our livelihoods, our education, and the very functioning of our democratic processes, it’s become critical to carefully consider the potential impact of every new technology we invent. This includes not only imagining all its positive effects, but how it might be misused or cause accidental harm through poor design, a misalignment of incentives, or the eventual impacts of scale.

This paper aims to kick-start this sort of discussion for Web Monetization by exploring its potential long-term impacts; positing both positive and negative ways the technology may change how we use the web, and providing recommendations to ensure they result in a more equitable, open, and diverse web.

The paper contains three sections.

Section one introduces the Interledger protocol and Web Monetization API, explaining the problems they aim to solve, how they work.
Section two presents three futures, each depicting a world where Web Monetization has become mainstream yet resulted in different behaviours, patterns of equity, and degrees of openness and interoperability on the web.
Section three presents my thoughts and recommendations for the many stakeholders who will take this technology forward—including us, its users.

These stories aren’t blueprints or business plans. Nothing is yet cast in stone. We can build this. But we can also choose not to. My goal in writing this isn’t to predict the future but to spark discussion around each scenario’s benefits and pitfalls.

Whom will they favour? Whom might they harm?

These questions are important, as they stimulate discussion, challenge assumptions, and motivate stakeholders to more clearly describe and agree on a future that is not only possible but preferable.

To that end, success for me would be to see this paper widely read, debated, and disputed, as a small step towards ensuring these technologies go on to provide useful and meaningful change; empowering new creators and audiences to use the web, and ensuring it remains accessible to everyone—especially those who need it the most.

Read the paper online or download the ebook.

Exploring the future of web monetization — Grant Report #1

Stephanie Rieger — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 23:15:56 +0000

Project Update

Hi! This is Stephanie.

This is my first update, and as my project was fairly short, it's also coming towards the end of the project. Progress has been excellent, and i'm on schedule (though have decided to request a short extension…more on this later)

Progress on objectives

If you're not familiar with this project, the project summary was as follows:

"A white-paper that explores the potential long-term impacts of the Web Monetization and Interledger protocols; posits both positive and negative ways these technologies may change to how we use the web, and provides recommendations to ensure these technologies result in a more equitable, open, and diverse web."

I'm so far quite happy with the work i've produced, and think it suits the brief quite well…with one exception, which I will outline below.

Early into my research, I discovered that the web monetization team was working on ways to also enable subscribers to tip small sums of money to their favourite sites. This was unexpected, as the specification had until then been quite specific about only supporting payments that required no user interaction. So while experimental (and at time of writing, as yet un-launched) the addition of tipping proved significant enough that I decided I really should explore both web monetization approaches:

ambient micropayments that automatically stream as you browse
small, user-initiated, discretionary micropayments

I was also starting to realise that, although my proposal had included the phrase "and the Interledger protocol" (and the web monetization API was wholly dependant on the existence of that protocol) exploring what might happen to web monetization specifically would get us much closer to the sort of discussions the paper was aiming to provoke. I therefore decided that, while the paper would introduce Interledger as a means of framing the capabilities that have made web monetization possible, I would primarily focus the speculative portion of the paper on web monetization.

To this end, the final white paper will include three scenarios.

a longer story that explores a future where streaming payments are the primary model;
a second, smaller story, that explores a hybrid approach inspired by the ways we consume other types of media;
a third, smaller story, that explores a future where micro-tipping is both widespread and native to the web

Key activities

Work on the white paper started in September with a month of discovery and research. Web monetization intersects with a wide range of subjects, so there was lots to dig into, including but not limited to:

new, existing, and defunct internet business models,
how web payments currently work,
emerging payment standards,
the economics of flat-rate streaming in other domains,
alternate approaches to digital payment around the world,
the challenges with today's web advertising ecosystem.

My research also included interviews with some of the people involved in the development of Interledger, the web monetization specification, and Coil.

This step was followed by several weeks of brainstorming, and concept development, culminating in the development of a high level outline of the paper, and its primary scenarios. I then wrote an early draft…and suddenly got really busy with other things.

This was somewhat anticipated (when I submitted the proposal back in June, it was hard to anticipate how my schedule might look in October), but turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it enabled me to complete the rest of the writing at a much slower pace. This proved extremely useful, as during that time I was able to dramatically augment my research thanks to the release of a very useful book, along with a pile of articles, podcasts, and white papers discussing the search for alternative ways to fund content and create sustainable communities on the web (which has, as it turns out, become a bit of a hot topic!)

Communications and marketing

I've yet to really discuss the work publicly (other than here :) That will happen once it's published!

What’s next?

This month, I'm putting finishing touches on the copy. I've also decided that before publishing the paper, I'd love to run it by a few people in the community. I'm aiming to find a minimum of two people - one with knowledge of/experience developing web standards, and another on the media/publisher/creator side of the ecosystem. This is something I hadn't originally planned, so I've requested a short extension--most of it to provide the reviewers time to give it a read and provide feedback. In total, I've requested one additional month, so hopefully that will be enough :0

What community support would benefit your project?

I have a few people in mind to review the paper, and a couple back-ups should they be unavailable, but these are strange times and many people are working from home while home-schooling (etc!) so if you're reading this and fit the bill in either of the categories mentioned above, I'd love to hear from you. You can comment below, or ping me on Twitter.

Apologies in advance if you don't make the list. With such a short extension (and half of it taken up waiting for the feedback to come in), I'm trying to limit the amount of feedback I receive, so I have time to carefully consider potential revisions.

That's all for now! More in a month's time…