The idea of micropayments--- charging Web users tiny amounts of money for single pieces of online content--- was basically put to sleep toward the end of the dot-com boom. In December 2000, Clay Shirky, a professor in New York University's interactive telecommunications program  , wrote a manifesto   that people still quote whenever someone suggests using the idea. "Micropayments will never work," he wrote, mainly because "users hate them."    But wait. Without many people noticing, micropayments have arrived--- just not in the way they were originally imagined. The 99 cents you pay for a song on the Internet is a micropayment. So are the tiny amounts that some operators of small web sites can earn whenever someone clicks on the ads on their pages. Some stock-photography companies sell pictures for as little as $1 each.    "Micropayments are here" said Benjamin M. Companie, a lecturer atprefix = st1 /NortheasternUniversity, "they just have not developed in the way that everybody expected."     From the earliest days of the Web until around the time of Mr Shirky's manifesto, the expectation was that a handful of companies would provide platforms---or perhaps a single platform--- that would enable Web users to pay a penny or a dollar for a bit of content such as a newspaper article, or a research report. Simply clicking a link would complete the transaction  .    Sellers of content--- at the time, newspaper companies---were among the most interested in the idea as they looked for tax income that didn't depend on advertising. Mr. Shirky predicted that   _  .
companies on the Internet would earn a lot of money Web users would never pay for the websites it was impossible to visit websites for free all the companies on the Internet would go bankrupt  .