Mozilla and Creative Commons Want To Reimagine the Internet Without Ads, and They Have $100M To Do It

An anonymous reader shares a report: Funding online content with small consumer payments rather than intrusive and privacy-compromising ads has for years been a goal for many internet theorists and publishers. “We’re at a point where it’s clear there’s kinds of negative side effects for people and even for democracy of the data-driven ad economy that funds the internet,” says Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. Now, Mozilla, Creative Commons, and a new micropayment startup have announced a $100 million grant program to finally bring that dream to fruition. The program, called Grant for the Web, will give roughly $20 million per year for five years to content sites, open source infrastructure developers, and others building around Web Monetization, a proposed browser standard for micropayments. “When we started Coil, Coil was essentially the first Web Monetization provider,” says founder and CEO Stefan Thomas. Coil users pay a fixed monthly fee that’s distributed among sites they visit that have Web Monetization enabled, such as the web development site CSS-Tricks, based on how long they visit the sites. The underlying technology supports other providers routing user funding as well.