Putting aside the major headache of trying to come up with an effective technical means of implementing micropayments (an unsolved problem littered with the corpses of peppy tech start-ups). Skirky's basic thesis is that any system that attaches a fixed price to viewing some pieces of content while others are free simply drives people away from the priced stuff (eg Wikipedia vs. paywalled Britannica even with their legacy advantage), in the same way that increasingly intrusive web ads drive people to image-blockers, flash-blockers, then ad-blockers. Whatever system we create, it must depend on enabling something users want to do (eg support news platforms they value) rather than tricking them into doing something they don't.
The best TL;DR is Shirky's own concluding comments from the piece linked above:
"What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers; the more time we waste fantasizing about magic solutions for the latter problem, the less time we have to figure out real solutions to the former one."
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