If normal people get to be anonymous then you don't know if someone accessing the site is OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, at which point why are they going to pay when anonymous access doesn't?
Also, this works pretty poorly for scrapers because people would just set up massive junk farms to collect micropayments from crawlers, and then either the amounts would be too small for real creators to get anything or anything requiring them just wouldn't get accessed. The latter is probably what a lot of the media companies want, but then if the AI companies aren't paying and the normal users aren't paying, who is?
If normal people get to be anonymous then you don't know if someone accessing the site is OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, at which point why are they going to pay when anonymous access doesn't?
Also, this works pretty poorly for scrapers because people would just set up massive junk farms to collect micropayments from crawlers, and then either the amounts would be too small for real creators to get anything or anything requiring them just wouldn't get accessed. The latter is probably what a lot of the media companies want, but then if the AI companies aren't paying and the normal users aren't paying, who is?