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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, perhaps they could get together to sort out a standardised payment method that would make paying for stuff online as easy as it is to purchase an iPhone app. No doubt, this would make them loads money and allow many more sites to charge money from their users.

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Right. It just needs to be a generic payment system. Much as we had premium rate dial up ISPs for a while to access porn (Apparently).

It could just be a very simple setup:

  1. webapp notices you're on ISP A
  2. webapp asks ISP A to bill you $3/month
  3. you get an email from your ISP asking for authorization
  4. you click the link and it's added to your bill

But this falls flat once you remove the assumption that a user only accesses the internet from a single ISP. So what happens when I decide to make that purchase on my lunch break at work? Or from the free wifi at the coffee shop?

There was a time that this would have worked, but I think there are too many people that aren't tied to a single physical location for their internet services. And we haven't all switched to something provided by a cell company.

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It works just fine and no need to get the thousands of ISPs that exist involved, which is incredibly messy.

Sure, but the user still has to have paypal setup, credit card, etc.

Going the ISP route is far cleaner, since they already have a billing relationship with the customer.

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