What I’d love to see is the government funding and running a way to do microtransactions over HTTPS.

Basically, one of the government’s jobs is to facilitate commerce, which it has done by issuing and regulating currency for centuries, and collecting sales tax. But we’ve moved beyond paper and metal currency. I can’t pay for an article on USA Today with a quarter. So the government should run a system, funded by automatically charged sales tax, that lets me do exactly that. Let me hook up my bank account to it, and say yes or no when a website wants to charge me 25¢ for an article (or however much).

It would be great to have a way that I can pay without a stupid subscription and without giving the website my credit card information. If I read 3 articles a month, I don’t want to pay a $14.99 subscription. But not charging that means news sites can’t survive. Wouldn’t it be great if we could pay for our media easily and news sites could charge for it in a non-exploitative way?