Being allowed to pay for services with money, rather than being required to pay for services with your personal data. I browse the web via a proxy when I'm on public wifi, and Google is nigh unusable with how many captchas it forces you to solve to do a single Google search. Fortunately Bing and DDG still work, for now.
And for the "this is a real person" service, they really don't have to charge much. I should be able to go to the store and pay a dollar for a PIN that gets anonymized on use and lasts a long time if not indefinitely when not abused.
> Being allowed to pay for services with money, rather than being required to pay for services with your personal data
One possible big disadvantage for a site owner in letting people pay with money instead of data is dealing with taxes.
I'm not actually sure how most jurisdictions tend to classify it when someone comes to your site and you charge them to access your content. My guess would be it would be taxed the same way they tax digital goods such as downloadable software that does not include any physical components.
For such goods most jurisdictions that tax them seem to base the tax on the buyer's location rather than the seller's location, so the seller has to deal with charging the appropriate tax and filing returns for potentially a large number of jurisdictions.
If the seller is providing the content for "free" and making their money selling visitor data to advertisers then their income will probably only be subject to taxation in their own jurisdiction. It will simply be ordinary business income.
My experience with taxation out side of the US, currently Australia, is that they are ridiculously reasonable and probably more on my, that is the business owners, side that I would like them to be.
It would be a net benefit for everyone, including the US, if it's broken taxation system becomes a national emergency and finally gets fixed.
Email has recurring costs to run. They need to process every email you receive and send and therefore any email service that actually wants to continue running will need to charge a subscription fee.
