Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

The team behind Chromium – the open source engine of Google Chrome and other browsers – is working on a way to enable those surfing the web to pay for the stuff they read or watch without any interaction.

Earlier this month, Alexander Surkov, a software engineer at open source consultancy Igalia, announced the Chromium team's intent to prototype Web Monetization, an incubating community specification that would let websites automatically receive payments from online visitors, as opposed to advertisers, via a web browser and a designated payment service.

"Web monetization is a web technology that enables website owners to receive micro payments from users as they interact with their content," Surkov wrote in an explanatory document published last summer.

"It provides a way for content creators and website owners to be compensated for their work without relying solely on ads or subscriptions. Notably, Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features – small payments and no user interaction – that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web."

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