Mozilla, Creative Commons Partner With $100M Web Payments Fund

Three companies have joined forces to change the way things are paid for online with a native web payments standard, according to a report by TechCrunch.

To help the initiative get off the ground, the three organizations — Coil, Mozilla and Creative Commons — have a $100 million grant called Grant for the Web.

The new protocol is meant to monetize the web in a way that’s standard and that everyone can use. It’s called Interledger and was started by former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas.

“We were basically applying the concept of internet protocol to payments — routing little packets of money,” Thomas said.

The system is not going to be powered using blockchain, he said, explaining Interledger is instead a way to securely send payments to other parties in an easy way.

“It supports any underlying payment structure, bitcoin or a bank ledger or whatever, and any connection you use, satellite or Wi-Fi, it doesn’t care,” he said. “We were working on it for a long time, since like 2015, and last year were like, ‘Well, how do we get this out into the real world?’”

The best way to do it was to join forces with Mozilla and Creative Commons, he said.

“This is an opportunity for CC to experiment with optional micropayments in CC Search,” said Creative Commons interim CEO Cable Green. “If users want to provide micropayments to authors of openly licensed images, to show gratitude, we’re interested in exploring these options with our global community. An open-source micropayment protocol and ecosystem could be good for creators and users. Building a web that doesn’t rely on data acquisition and advertising is a good thing.”

Thomas said it’s important to push payments because of the way money moves on the internet.

“The underlying business model for the web is kind of broken,” he said, referring to huge companies like Google that rely on advertising. “From our perspective, what the standard is ultimately competing with is proprietary platforms with billions in funding.”