We all love the Internet, some of us not wisely but too well. Take me for instance. I could write the book on dysfunctional relationships with cyberspace. It would be called Geeks Who Love Too Much. Now matter how much it hurts me, I hang on in there, kidding myself that if I loved it just a little bit more I could change it.

And here's the delusion I'm pinning my hopes on. It's called micropayments, and this is how it would work for bloggers.

The world's high readership bloggers, individual providers of quality content, would set up a co-operative. I'm clearly not talking about me here. You might have been deceived by the phrase 'quality content', but if you look closely you'll see it also says 'high readership'.

Anyone who wants to read any post from any registered site has to pay let's say 0.1p for each one, charged as follows. First, they pay in a tenner, say. Every time they click on a link for a post on one of the blogs in the system, they get charged 0.1p off their balance. After they've read, or at least downloaded, 10,000 posts, another £10 is automatically deducted from their bank account, or PayPal, or whatever.

You only have to register once for the whole thing, rather than once for each site. The first time you access data from any site under the new system, the software asks you whether you want to confirm the payment each time, or simply charge each page view on that site automatically.

The central computer holding this data, as well as having an account for each reader, also has an account for each blogger. Every time a blogger earns say £25, that money gets paid into their bank account at the end of the month in which they pass the £25 threshold. For the small number of bloggers making more than that every month, it becomes a second salary. For the Huffington Posts of this world, with let's say an average hundred thousand readers of each post (a total guess), they make £30,000 a month if they post ten pieces a day.

The central organisation pays four or five geeks a reasonable wage to keep it all working. If enough content providers all over the world are involved, then their wages are only a few percent of income - possibly even paid for by the interest on the time lag between readers paying and contributors being paid.

Suppose you look at 25 posts a day, far more than most people. Your £10 would last for just over a year. Suppose you have an average readership of 10,000. You would make £10 a post.

Everyone who has their own domain already just keeps it. If people are with regular blog companies, they might need somewhere else. Perhaps the central organisation could run a blog site itself, for a percentage.

If people have advertising on their site, they keep the revenue this generates. The same applies to any other revenue sources - T-shirt sales, and suchlike.

Similar models could be created for pictures, for music, for video, comic strips, whatever you want. The system could cope with variable charges for short or long posts, or for posts with multimedia features. Rather than charging by the post, you could perhaps charge by the word.

It's strange. It's such a brilliant idea, and yet you all hate it. These are the objections you've raised in conversation, which incidentally are all rubbish, and the brilliant refutations you've dismissed out of hand.

It won't work because in the digital age everything can be copied at the click of a button, so people will go and look and look at the free version. The digital generation have no qualms about breaking copyright, which is becoming unenforceable.

To copy takes time and energy. For an 80p iTunes download this is worth it, but to save 0.1p? Where's the motivation? For each individual reader, the time and energy you'd need to invest in stealing content would show a poor return if you're only paying a tenner every year or two anyway. I reckon in my entire career I've made maybe 1000 blog posts. By my scheme, to have read all of them would have cost a quid. Why not just pay it?

Also, the real comments stream would be at the original site, so if you wanted to take part in discussions, that's where you'd have to go.

There isn't enough money involved to make it worth the bloggers' time.

But if I had 10,000 readers, I'd have made £10,000. And if I haven't got 10,000 readers, I'm not really a proper professional anyway.

If I had 1,000 readers, I'd have made £1000. This isn't much, but it pays for your broadband, and it's some small return for your time and energy.

I haven't got a thousand readers, but like I said, this isn't about me. No it isn't.

People mostly click away from sites that ask them to sign up.

Yes, but you'd only need to sign up once, with the micropayments company. Once you were registered with them, each individual site would just ask you to confirm that you were happy to pay for posts once. To put it bluntly, if all the decent sites were micropayment sites, people would have to register.

People would ignore charging sites, and only go to the free ones.

Pornography sites make money, despite the existence of free pornography. Bookshops make money despite the existence of libraries. Obviously going to a library twice is a lot less convenient than going to a bookshop once, but it's equally true that the cost of a book is a lot more than 0.1p.

This is the worst writing you've ever done

You've clearly never seen one of my job applications. In any case, it's not a refutation of the argument.

Why don't you just fuck off, and stop badgering us with your stupid ideas?

Well go and get another bus then.

When I think about the economics of the Internet, I'm struck by the way it could cut right through the whole corporate baggage train, and eliminate the need for factories to print papers and magazines in, presses to make CDs or DVDs, trucks and trains to move it all about, shops to sell them in - the whole caboodle. Gone would be the acres of pine forest replacing deciduous woodland. There would be less ugly new shops defacing our town centres, and less need for juggernauts to haul products to them. Our choice of journalist, and for that matter our choice of film-maker, author or musician, could come directly to us, wherever we are, at a fraction of the cost we currently pay.

But having eliminated virtually all the costs except for the time and energy of the journalist or creative artist, we've yet to provide a decent mechanism to pay for the comparatively small sums of money involved, which means that the creatives are forced back into the arms of big business. I'm thinking about solutions to that. Any comments?