Have you ever encountered error code 402? Payment Required
That’s been part of HTTP since at least 1992. His w3c wanted to make micropayments part of the web. The reason it did not take off is that no one had a use for it. The web was too cheap to meter.
This would be perfect for the current problem of monetizing journalism. I am happy to pay a small fee to read an article. I am not ok subscribing to your entire website that requires an account when I get blasted with unsolicited emails and my data is sold to a 3rd party to pad your profits.
One of the reasons might me that we still do not have any standard baked micropayment system for the Internet.
There were a bunch of systems, back during the dotcom bubble. You can see a list in the specs: https://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/Overview.html#Reading
