--- begin forwarded text Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 13:28:39 -0800 (PST) From: William Knowles <erehwon@dis.org> To: DCSB <dcsb@ai.mit.edu> Subject: Group works on way to make Net payments work. Organization: Home for retired social engineers & unrepented cryptophreaks MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: bounce-dcsb@ai.mit.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: William Knowles <erehwon@dis.org> SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - Someone out there is actually worried that you might end up with a desktop littered with different digital wallets or that you might not get a receipt for your pay-per-view time visiting an X-rated site. In fact, a group of 30 electronic payment companies are working on a protocol that would ensure that all digital wallets and cybercash registers will know how to talk to each other and issue the proper digital "paper trails." Spearheaded by ecash pioneer, Mondex International, the group is working on an way to make a single digital wallet on the desktop to interact with the payment systems designed by everyone from CyberCash to AT&T to Wells Fargo Bank. By using XML (extended markup language), the protocol is designed to ensure interoperability among the software used by buyers, sellers, and financial institutions to carry out online transactions. The open trading protocol hasn't gotten half the attention that SET, the secure electronic transaction protocol, has. And, at first glance, its job may not seem as crucial since it's not about guaranteeing the security of transactions. But those aboard the new protocol-defining body say their system of compatible operations is key to getting consumers to really embrace e-commerce. "Imagine if you've got an IBM wallet, a Microsoft wallet, and a VeriFone wallet," suggested Mondex International development co-director, David Burdett. "Unless you have some standard way in which these wallets can communicate with each other and with merchants, you aren't going to end up with interoperability and the consumer's going to have to have lots of different wallets on the PC." The goal of the open trading protocol is to make transparent the traditional steps in a transaction: the offer for sale, agreement to purchase, generation of receipt, and attendant paper trail. And to make it all happen with no more than a click of the buyer's mouse. "(The open trading protocol) is trying to replicate in the virtual world what people have in the real world: things like invoices, making payments, getting receipts and delivery of goods," said Burdett. And to guarantee that you can have real-world accountability, even for virtual purchases. "If you're only getting delivery of virtual goods over the Net, such as software or entertainment content that you pay for, there's no physical delivery at all; but you still want a receipt and all the other normal aspects of a transaction," Burdett said. A preliminary version of the proposed common language was posted early this month to the OTP Web site, by the 30-member consortium, which includes CyberCash, DigiCash, IBM, MasterCard, Mondex, Netscape, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, VeriFone, and Wells Fargo Bank. Conspicuously absent from the coalition are Visa International, which reportedly declined to join the coalition when invited by Mondex, and Microsoft, which apparently opted out of the group's plan because it is busy developing an alternate standard called the Value Chain Initiative. Still, Microsoft's absence isn't expected to thwart widespread adoption of the protocol. "There's a lot of flexibility with these protocols," said Zona Research analyst Vernon Keenan, who pointed out that the group protocol and Microsoft's version are not necessarily mutually exclusive. "The key factor to determine adoption is whether ... the major commerce server players incorporate these protocols." And it seems at least several will, since they've already joined the ranks of open trading protocol proponents. -- The information standard is more draconian than the gold standard, because the government has lost control of the marketplace. -- Walter Wriston -- http://www.dis.org/erehwon/ For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "dcsb-request@ai.mit.edu" with one line of text: "help". --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>