I just randomly stepped on a press release by the Web Consortium: start of a new working group for payments over the Internet. I didn’t read all the text yet (it is quite a lot), but I strongly believe this is a step in the right direction, so I’d like to spread the news.
Specific goals are yet to be defined, but the main effort is to make Web payments more secure, reliable and easy, so that they could be incorporated into browsers seamlessly. And, what feels like a dream come true to me, to “find alternatives to business models based on advertisement” – no more need to bashfully using Adblock, we could just pay for what we get.
Note that as usually with the W3C, the outcome of this is not supposed to be a piece of software, but rather a pile of open standards, letting anybody to code that software at their will.
How do you feel about this? Do you think there is any catch to the proposal?
Links:
w3.org/Payments
Workshop final report
Community group