Back in the 1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee and his team were creating the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, they made a list of the error codes that would pop up when something went wrong. You’ve surely encountered many of them: “ 404 Not Found,” which pops up if you click on a dead link; “401 Unauthorized” when you hit a page that needs a password; and so on.

Here’s one you probably haven’t seen—and its absence from your life speaks to why the promise of the early web seems increasingly out of reach: “402 Payment Required.”

That’s right: The web’s founders fully expected some form of digital payment to be integral to its functioning, just as integral as links, web pages, and passwords. After all, without a way to quickly and smoothly exchange money, how would a new economy be able to flourish online? Of course there ought to be a way to integrate digital cash into browsing and other activities. Of course.

Yet after almost three decades, that 402 error code is still “reserved for future use.” So I still have to ask: Where are my digital micropayments? Where are those frictionless, integrated ways of exchanging money online—cryptographically protected to allow commerce but not surveillance?

I don’t really want a flying car, but I do want to be able to shed pennies (and fractions of pennies) as I browse news or read fiction online. I want to easily support artists and writers without having to set up an account, create a password, fork over my credit card details, and commit to an ­ongoing­ relationship that involves receiving a new piece of spammish email at least once a week.

What would such a system look like? It would be as seamless as browsing itself. It could have an automatic mode (a news subscription consortium, for instance, could silently disperse payments to individual publications as I read articles from members) or a one-click mode. (Stumble across a nice poem on some unfamiliar site? A small green button on your browser lights up, and you can make a one-time contribution.) And, much as Apple Pay already does now, vendors wouldn’t necessarily get your account information, just a cryptographic payment token that’s good for exchange or verification.

Of course, we already make payments online all the time, but under current conditions, frankly, it sucks to do so. If you buy things directly from small vendors, you’re stuck entering your credit card information, your email, and your billing address on site after site—sinking ever deeper into the surveillance economy as each digital form puts your personal details into someone else’s database, while also giving hackers ever more opportunities to filch your data.

Given how terrible this is, many of us opt for the convenience of “one-click” setups, which allow you to enter your information once into a large company’s database, and then they facilitate future purchases from a wide array of merchants. No wonder the ecommerce landscape is so hypercentralized, dominated by giants like Amazon and eBay.

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Another thing that happens in the absence of a digital-native micropayment system? Content creators have to rely on advertising to support themselves. This, too, is a losing game for all but the biggest players. Even the apparent winners of the digital ad economy—Facebook and YouTube—must operate at vast scale, engage in copious surveillance, and subject their systems to minimal human oversight to make ad financing work. Content creators are left chasing eyeballs and fractions of ad dollars on these giant platforms, whose business model favors virality, misinformation, and outrage. As if all that weren’t bad enough, intrusive and bloated layers of ad tech slow down the internet and serve as potential vectors for malware. Plus the online ad business is rife with click fraud; the whole thing may be a house of cards.