More Micropayments

Tim Oren points out Andrew Odlyzko's paper "The Case Against Micropayments". Although largely negative, Odlyzko's final paragraph offers a glimmer of hope for micropayments:

Still, micropayments may become widespread. There are needs that micropayments are uniquely suited to fill. However, given all the obstacles that micropayments face, they are unlikely to succeed if offered as a service that requires special hardware or software. They are most likely to succeed if they piggyback on top of something that is already widely used, such as cell phones, or (in some places) mass-transit smart cards. When offered as an additional feature for something that is already carried by most of the population, micropayments might be able to overcome the usual chicken and egg problem, and find their (very likely small) niche in the economy.

So, when and where might a breakthrough in adoption of micropayments on a mass scale occur? A Google News search on micropayments reveals a lot going on. Update: Paul Guthrie comments via email:

I think one might argue that Micropayments have broken through if you include Premium rate SMS transactions (mostly in Europe) or NTT DoCoMo's model in Japan. These approaches might more accurately be called micro-billing. As for something successful on the web, still very little is going on. So, the question in my mind, is with a convergence going on between web and mobile technologies, when will one of these systems start getting mainstream make the transition, and is a transition even possible, considering the mindset of web users is not to pay for anything, while the mindset of mobile users is to pay for every little thing.