WWW Buy Info List

NOTE Note: Last updated Oct 1994.

This announcement was made by Dave Kristol, AT&T Bell Laboratories, [email protected]:

Announcing a new mailing list: www-buyinfo. Information about how to subscribe appears at the end of this message.

Subscriptions will be accepted immediately. Contributions to the mailing list itself will be rejected until Tuesday, August 16, 1994, to make sure (slightly) belated subscribers don't miss the early discussions. Those who subscribe by August 16 will be notified when the mailing list "opens" for discussion.

The purpose of the mailing list is to discuss topics related to this vision:

Potential information providers would willingly make a vast array of information available on the World-Wide Web (WWW) if they knew they could get paid for it. The system should work like this: using your favorite WWW client program, when you select a hypertext link ("buyinfo link") that reaches a server that charges money for the information, the server informs the client program (via HTTP) that there is an associated charge and lists the available payment options. The client can give up, either because it has no payment capability or because the user chooses not to buy the information. Otherwise the client passes the server some information (via HTTP) that will enable the server to be reimbursed for the information. The server then returns that purchased information. If the client is designed in a way that the user can make money available beforehand (and with a suitable user-protection interface), a user could traverse buyinfo links effortlessly, and the financial details would occur invisibly. These components are required to implement the vision:

http: to allow the exchange of cost and payment information
client/server application programmer interfaces (APIs) that make it easy to add different kinds of payment schemes
clients that provide an attractive, convenient, safe interface to support payment
ways to support transactions in multiple currencies

Some possible payment schemes are: anonymous credit cards, DigiCash, electronic checks, conventional credit cards.

Other relevant topics for this mailing list:

the privacy of financial transactions
authentication of payers
the efficiency of payment schemes

(Note: I expect that many of the authentication issues will be solved in a more general context by people working on secure HTTP and will be discussed on the www-security mailing list.)

This mailing list is NOT for discussion about:

whether charging for information is a good idea
how to exchange orders electronically

To subscribe:

	Send mail to [email protected]
	Body of message:	subscribe www-buyinfo

To unsubscribe:

	Send mail to [email protected]
	Body of message:	unsubscribe www-buyinfo

To contribute to the mailing list:

	Send mail to [email protected]

Mail archives will be located in:

	ftp.research.att.com:/dist/www-buyinfo-archive/

October 1994