“the biggest technology trends are the ones no one predicts”
In the comments for this post, Richard Majewicz makes the following comment.

I am still waiting for someone to come up with a copyright attribution product that will enable people to download content at (say) one tenth or one hundredth of a penny (or cent) per page which will be paid directly to the copyright owner (less a management fee). The content would be secured by suitable encryption to prevent piracy.

Suddenly, everyone could become an author and be paid for it. Quality would be paid for by higher charges per page (and more hits).

Richards suggestion would, imo, mean the death of the web. It’s bad enough that you can’t link to articles in the NY Times archives anymore and that most newspaper archives require a subscription. What’s next? Paying by the byte on the web?