Web Payments with Manu Sporny | The Web Ahead

Web Payments with Manu Sporny

Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - 2:00pm

For years, the idea of paying for content on the web was taboo. Everything is free! We should be able to read anything, watch anything, go anyplace all for free. Charging money is evil! No one should get paid!

Slowly commerce has come to the web. First we got excited about online stores that sell physical goods and ship them to customers. Then we got used to the idea of sites that sell digital goods, like ebooks and digit videos that you download. That's kind of the same thing, the product just happens to be digital. Next, a few well-funded sites started selling access to their content. Netflix, Hulu Plus, the New York Times… people've been quite critical of corporate sites that put premium content behind paywalls. Thing is, it takes a lot of time and effort to make great things. And in order to become really good at making something, you need to do it a lot, for a long time. Which usually means you need to get paid, so it's your day job, not just a hobby. Hm.

So these days, it's become very easy to create an online store where you sell products and collect money through a credit card or from a PayPal account. It's much harder to create a paywall — a way for people to get to content only if they've bought a membership paid a one-time fee. Large corporations have the resources to build such platforms, but small projects don't.

Folks who work on web standards have noticed such things. Turns out, the web is a huge part of our economy, and it should be easier to transfer money or charge tiny amounts for access. If there were a payment system baked deep into web technology itself — baked into the browser and into the backbone of the web — we could implement such payment gateways and platforms more easily. And perhaps without involving so many middle-man-companies that each take a cut.

Web Standards folks are working on such a spec at the W3C — Web Payments. And I've been wanting to do a show on this topic for quite a while. I finally emailed a bunch of different people and asked them, who would be a good person to talk about all this? Everyone gave me one name: Manu Sporny. He's the one. So he'll be on the show to explain what's up.

Manu Sporny

Manu is a Founder and CEO of Digital Bazaar, and a chairman for the Web Payments and JSON-LD Community Groups at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He also chairs the RDFa standardization work at the W3C and spends most of his time driving the creation of open standards and open technology that will integrate Linked Data, open identity, and payments into the core architecture of the Web.

A champion for science and the arts, his life’s work is focused on empowering people to enact global change through the Web. He is currently focused on expanding the core infrastructure of the Web to include peer-to-peer payments, distributed banking, crowd funding, and a variety of other transparent-by-design financial services that will become the foundation of the new economy.