Since I started using Amazon EC2 as a web proxy I’ve found that I’m exploiting it pretty regularly. Every time that I see one of those ‘you can’t access that content from your country’ type messages I have a choice. I can give up and move on, or I can fork out 2¢ to spin up a machine, and get access. 2¢ isn’t a lot of money, so more often than not I pay.

Video

I pay to see video content. Of course my 2¢ goes to Amazon, and not the people who made the video (and don’t want me to watch it outside the US).

File lockers

I pay to get stuff from file lockers (when I’ve already exceeded my quota from my home IP). Of course my 2¢ goes to Amazon, and not the people running the file locker (and is a whole lot less than one of their subscription plans). Oddly it seems that downloading from some of the services is faster down an SSH tunnel from Amazon in the US than it is over my regular broadband connection (WTF?).

Amazon 2 : Other services 0

So – living proof that micro-payments work for stuff on the web. What a shame that the payments are going to the wrong place. If only those other service providers had a smart new business model like Amazon’s maybe they’d get my 2¢.