CDR: RE: Non-Repudiation in the Digital Environment (was Re: First Monday August 2000)

Todd Boyle tboyle at rosehill.net
Tue Oct 17 14:33:35 PDT 2000


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 






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