Tim Berners-Lee, like Sean Connery playing Captain Ramius in The Hunt for Red October, is asking the web’s governing body to fix the craziness that exists on the Internet around how we buy things. If anyone can get the web to listen, it would be the person who invented it.
Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times wrote an interesting article on this topic this week. You can find the story here. For those of you who read my previous post, this effort might sound quite a bit like the consortium work around the OSI networking standard. Popper writes that the W3C “has brought together the giants of the internet” to create “a new global standard for online payments.” Alternate solutions exist and are already in widespread use. Sound familiar? How do you think this will play out? Will this standardization effort succeed? If so, why? If not, what parts of history will repeat themselves?
I will admit that I’m not much of a shopper, online or in stores. I feel the urge to do too much comparison shopping before I buy anything, and when I get to the point of making a purchase, I don’t mind that it takes me more than a single click. Buying something and parting with money should take time, or at least that was how I was raised. Ever since I first heard of Amazon 1-click, I’ve always felt that this was something that advantaged the seller more than the buyer. Again, what do you think? Is “tap, tap, buy” good for our society?
On the other hand, we could use with better security around web purchases and payments. Shopping online isn’t going away. In fact, it’s growing. The W3C and the members of this group aren’t wrong that more standardization and careful thought around the security issues would benefit us all. My last question for you: So how do we get from here to there?
If you want to learn more about this particular standardization effort, you might visit “Web Payments at W3C.”