Mac Norton said
Oh and as to non-repudiation and lawyers throwing that term around loosely: Most lawyers would probably tell you that, for their purposes, whatever the parties *agree* to be non-repudiation *is* non-repudiation as between *them*.
Ed Gerck said
Borrowing from a private comment from Bob Jueneman, whatever the technical community decides that non-repudiation means, it probably isn't what the legal community means. So be it.
Acknowledging the overwhelming victory of credit cards in B2C commerce, one could conclude that consumers prefer total wraparound repudiability to specific vendor warranties. Reading warranties takes so much time that the argument over definitions of non-repudation is academic. What's needed is a standard contract that emulates the protections provided by Visa and Mastercard --a virtual credit card. This would enable an unbundling of settlement services from "insurance" components. A diverse industry of payments and settlements providers, credit services, and risk underwriters would emerge. You need to achieve a plug-and-play environment to compete with banks and cc consortia, and equally bad "bundle propositions" emerging from alternative payments providers. SMBs and website operators are fed up with the cost of credit cards. Another industry is the webledger industry-- They would take immediate notice of such a contract, since any webledger can basically serve as a bank or settlement provider to its population of subscribers. For example, of the leading webledgers will soon announce an infrastructure for its users to submit intercompany transactions to each other; this makes the webledger a B2B host, and technically, enables any subscriber to offer settlement services to other subscribers. READ THIS: www.gldialtone.com/journalbus.htm In summary: what's missing from the payments environment isn't technology, but legal infrastructures, Todd