Edition of

The Daily Agent

Reporting on how software pays, proves who it is, and reads the web.

Payments

Paywalls, micropayments, and what changes when a request can settle its own bill.

Why agents need paywalls too

Publishers built login walls to keep bots out. The bots your readers actually send are now the traffic worth letting in, and HTTP has had the status code for it since 1997.

Mara Okafor, . 4 min read