So we ended up with banner ads and spam, and then by a hop, skip and a jump today's hideously bloated ecosystem of ad exchanges, trackers, ghost cookies, third-party javascripts that download megabytes of libraries to figure out who you are and who is willing to pay the most for a few seconds in front of your eyeballs ... and so on.

There were two contenders for the funding mechanism in the early days: micro-billing (in which you pay pennies, fractional or otherwise, for access to web pages) and advertising (in which the page is nominally free but you pay the bandwidth overheads of downloading someone else's idea of what they want you to see). Advertising won out because in the long-ago era of modem-based downloads micro-billing was expensive; you might only need to exchange a couple of KB of data to fund a transaction, but when many folks were still using modems that topped out at an asthmatic 9600 bits/second, the bandwidth cost was just too high to support microbilling.

Back in 1994-96, during the Big Bang era of rapid expansion as the world wide web expanded into the outline of its future shape, there was considerable discussion of how best to pay for everything. Back in the early days of the internet NSFNet basically forbade commercial use of internet connected systems — this went out the window rapidly once the world wide web caught on as a publishing medium.

Now we get to the post-2007 era of multitouch smartphones and tablets and monetization/funding strategies. Google -- or should I say, DoubleClick, the world's largest advertising agency -- is reasonably easy to understand: they want their OS (Android) on as many devices as possible in order to funnel ads at the customers. Apple is somewhat less scrutable: they're best understood as a hardware company (although they also have diversified into a variety of fields, including content sales) and they want their hardware in as many hands as possible, which means providing a slick end-user experience. Both firms support an appified ecosystem in which the public web isn't so much locked out as rendered increasingly irrelevant. And Apple has taken the next logical step by permitting ad-blockers in their standard web browser (as of iOS 9).

(Warning to Apple-phobes: you may not like Apple, but current sales of iOS devices outweigh the sales volume of the entire PC industry. Apple won the race to be the first post-PC consumer electronics company, and now occupy a niche roughly analogous to Sony's in the pre-personal computing consumer electronics world: a premium brand and market maker with enormous clout. So for "Apple" read "everyone else in the post-PC device world, sooner or later".)

A lot of self-identified content creators are quite irate about the rise of ad-blocking; they've grown accustomed to their writing being funded by advertising sales. But to those of us who earn our crust from writing without ads, and who pay the atrocious bandwidth and performance bills imposed by the advertisers, it looks like the current state of the ad-funded web is a death-spiral and a race to the bottom. Casual information consumers won't pay for access to paywalled sites, and a lot of the struggling/bottom-feeding resources on the web are engaged in a zero-sum game for access to the same eyeballs that are increasingly irritated by the clickbait and attention-grabbing excesses of the worst advertisers.

Anyway, this leads to my question: is there any way to get to a micro-billing infrastructure from where we are today that doesn't involve burning down the web and starting again from scratch?

So: are there any promising distributed microbilling payment platforms out there on the horizon, other than the Google and Apple company stores? And if not, what is to be done?

(NB: anyone who says "Bitcoin" will be banned for stupidity. Non-BtC applications of the blockchain are another matter: but BtC itself is no more a solution to microbilling than stockpiling gold bullion is a solution to high-interest-rate credit cards targeting the poor and those with bad credit records.)