Allow MCP server to charge a fee based on response, great to incentive content publisher adoption

[puchengy]

Pre-submission Checklist

• I have verified this would not be more appropriate as a feature request in a specific repository
• I have searched existing discussions to avoid duplicates

Your Idea

Imagine content publisher can charge a fee for putting their proprietary data in the response. This case will increase both supply (aka MCP servers ran by content publishers) due to economical reasons and demand (aka MCP client) due to more diverse available in the protocol.

Scope

• Protocol Specification
• SDK Features
• Documentation
• Developer Experience
• Other

[tadasant]

I think this is a really good idea and I alluded to it in the discussion on #84 (here).

The infrastructure (i.e. payments) itself should be the responsibility of a third party service built on top of the spec, and building out that publisher/consumer marketplace and all associated discovery is the lion's share of the work here.

You technically probably don't need any changes to the MCP spec to make this a reality. You need to build a publicly available index of "what kind of proprietary data does each MCP server have access to", and then you can connect potential data consumers with MCP servers that are gated via the new OAuth spec. They authenticate with some third party payments service, process the payment, and then the MCP server is authorized to return the data the consumer is asking for.