Last time I checked the news companies put their articles online for anyone to read. I don't see how Google isn't authorized to access the content. I'm pretty sure they follow robots.txt. If the news companies can't make money from people reading their articles, maybe they should just stop putting them online.
How? Without thinking too deep about it (so curious) wouldn’t a micropayment economy look exactly like the likes/views/engagement economy, only, perhaps distributed?
What I mean, the change of currency doesn magically solve the problem on how to detect and promote actual value and then organize people into funding that instead of the next shit determined by an algorithm to catch your attention
You can make pennies per article with adsense ads at no direct cost to your audience and people use ad blocker rampantly. You can also use PayPal to give as little as a dollar. I have sites with PayPal tip jars. When people tip, they rarely leave only one dollar. Those that tip usually are more generous than that.
I'm quite convinced that people wanting micropayments to be solved are pretty much like friends who say they would give you money if they won the lottery. In other words, these are people who just don't want to do anything for you, but don't want to admit to that. So they latch onto some implausible scenario and enthusiastically swear up and down that should lightening strike, they will absolutely do X, knowing the odds are very long against that happening.
But why would you spend effort on quality content, the same public getting manipulated into consuming crap in exchange for their time would just as happily waste their “micro money” on the same crap
