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Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch recently stated the obvious when he said the newspaper business model of providing content online for free was "malfunctioning." Poleaxed by a severe ad slump and hemorrhaging red ink, printed newspapers and magazines have been downsizing or closing in some countries, even as their digital editions attract growing numbers of readers. Murdoch - whose News Corp. media empire includes the Wall Street Journal, a rare newspaper with a profitable, subscription-based website - has vowed to boost the earning power of his digital properties by increasing the number of News Corp. sites that charge for content. Other publishers...
...course, publishers are not the first to view so-called micropayments as a potential source of revenue for digital content. Apple's iTunes store showed it was possible to build a billion-dollar business by selling songs for 99 cents each. And, although many analysts doubt publishers can make the switch from free to fee, there is another industry that is currently making a similar transition: online gaming...
...Unfortunately, micropayments in the past have failed to live up to lofty expectations. Over the last 10 years, several companies including U.S.-based Peppercoin and CyberCash offered online payment systems that didn't catch on. PlaySpan CEO Karl Mehta says this is because "there was not enough digital content to consume." That's changing. Mehta predicts that micropayment services will over the next few years become available on a wide range of gaming and social websites - adding that there's no reason they can't be used to buy newspaper and magazine articles, too. "The newspaper industry is now crying...
...Meanwhile, White House officials say they are content to watch this ugly phase of the process - one of many it is likely to go through before it is over - from the sidelines. "It's going to look like a mess for a few weeks," said an official. "But overall, we think this is helpful. CBO has sent a signal that everyone needed to hear: This is not just an intellectual exercise...
...there are counter-countermeasures to this kind of censorship. Sympathetic observers outside Iran have set up "proxies," servers that relay Twitter content into Iran through network addresses that haven't been blocked yet. When the Iranian authorities discover such a proxy, they block it too. It's an arms race crossed with whack-a-mole. Protesters are also organizing denial-of-service attacks against government websites - coordinated efforts to shut down their servers by flooding them with traffic...