When a customer makes a purchase, information like the credit card number can be encrypted using that public key, rather than the merchant’s key. To the merchant, it’s a blob of binary data that passes through the system. We may begin offering that kind of functionality in some Netscape products later this year.
In the short term, people will use the WWW as an interface to whatever systems they have, with people taking their traditional EDI systems and running them over their Internet connections. But for the longer term, I hope we’ll see electronic commerce using objects on the Web. Web protocols don’t support such transactions yet.
I think the role the government is in now seems to work well – providing access for educational institutions. It also would make a lot of sense for the Postal Service to certify senders and recipients in certain transactions. There’s a huge liability problem with the idea of certification authorities. If the Postal Service takes that role, the liability issue would be nearly zero. Fraud simply would be a criminal offense. If the post office is willing to say, “This person is certified to be who he says he is,” when I run into that person on the Net, I can trust him to be who he says he is – if I trust the post office.
The government can help support the low-bandwidth customers who aren’t on the leading edge of technology. I’d like to see funding for overview services such as a WWW virtual library and disinterested summaries of information by libraries or expert groups. The government can also be a source of funding for research, for things like protocols. The Advanced Research Projects Agency is a very important source for this.
I think the government should be in there as a user community and a customer. It can influence the process, but I’m not sure the government should be in there purely for a standard-setting role. [But] some things in this area eventually may become Federal Information Processing Standards.
The danger comes when the government engages in design by committee. It shouldn’t commission a standard. So far, Internet standards haven’t been like that. They’ve developed via open discussion on the network. When government representatives get involved that way, they can do a lot of good.
The jockeying for position for the payment-protocol standards … slows commerce. We need the Microsofts and the Netscapes to arrive on standards, and right now that’s unclear how that’s going to unfold. The growth of the Web is huge, but commerce has yet to take off, and standards have to come into play.
The Internet is no longer an academic and research mechanism. Well over half of the Web is now business domains. And I would say that fairly soon, a business without a presence on the Web will be like a business without a fax machine.
The world is going to be one Internet. It’s happening right now. Today there are more than 100,000 networks connected with the Internet. Parts of that Internet will be cordoned off behind firewalls to protect against intrusion and to protect information – payroll files, for example. But most information should be shared and can be shared and will be shared because of the Web.
It seems to me that we have to keep a balance. The balance right now, as I see it, is tipping toward virtual technology, toward virtual reality, toward mediated worlds, and that mediation is dangerous both culturally and politically. Culturally, it sets us apart from one another. Politically, it opens us up to manipulation. Someone can manipulate the reality I’m getting on-line more easily than they can manipulate the reality I get face-to-face. So the answer is to go carefully, to take a selective look at what we’re losing along the way, to discuss what’s happening.