[SauntSolaire]

It's also the incentive structure that's different. E.g. I can choose to buy cheaper LED lights to reduce my electricity costs because the interests of lightbulb companies are mostly orthogonal to the (usage-based) interests of the utility providers.

Micro-payments are more akin to a hypothetical world in which the lightbulb company gets paid via my electricity bill; now they have an incentive to sell incandescents over LEDs. Similar to how micro-payment (and advertising) based news companies have an incentive to sell click-bait, because they're getting paid based on usage rather than a flat fee.

[Paracompact]

This seems like a problem of perverse incentives independent of the medium of micropayment (cash vs. ad farming), no? I suppose the only way around that particular problem would be to decouple their revenue from the number of people actually accessing their content, which as far as I can tell precludes those people being the patrons. Instead the patron would be some larger corporate or public body auditing and funding them based on merit.

Curiously, there are still perverse incentives even in the case of lightbulbs and other consumable goods or technologies: planned obsolescence, delay of technology upgrades, and deliberate backroom deals from associated resource providers.

[SauntSolaire]

Yes! You can partially decouple it through recurring subscriptions, or possibly bundling, such as cable TV. But I can't think of a viable micro-payment method that wouldn't have the same problem.

Planned obsolescence is a failure mode because unit consumption (vs metered consumption) is the monetization scheme. Hypothetically this could be decoupled through something like lifetime warranties, but that has too many failure modes to be broadly viable.

The point is, despite other perverse incentives, with lightbulbs you have a situation in which unit consumption and metered consumption are at odds, so one company can make more money by enabling the customer to spend less elsewhere. Of course, if you ever tie the two together, such that one company profits from metered consumption and controls/profits from the unit -- Inkjet printers with proprietary cartridges come to mind -- you've now adopted an anti-consumer business model.

It's ideal when corporate incentives end up opposed to each other for the benefit of the consumer, but I think you'll be hard pressed to create that through micro-payments.