Re: Mozilla and navigator.mozPay() for Firefox OS

On Jan 21, 2013, at 8:43 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
> 
>> A user will already be on the phone so why not charge a payment to 
>> their bill?
> 
> It's a good option and makes sense when you're on a phone. However, we
> want to give folks more options than that. Centralizing payments at a
> mobile operator could lead to some fairly negative effects if payments
> through this mechanism becomes standard. That is, it would effectively
> create a monopoly among a small handful of carriers, which would drive
> transaction prices up.
> 
> So, in addition to being able to perform the purchase via the carrier,
> we want to provide many other options for payment as well. Strong
> competition helps keep fees and price gouging down.

I agree. The future is not too bright for overcoming operator lock-in when it comes to the mobile world (e.g. for carrier billing the device can be authenticated with an operator-hosted service) but the optimist in me thinks that some changes will occur when Firefox OS pushes standard web implementations for mobile apps. We'll see. It will take baby steps.

> 
>> This is navigator.mozPay() which you can read about in 
>> https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPayment and also in 
>> https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/WebPaymentProvider The latter 
>> describes the server side of which Mozilla will ship an 
>> implementation, currently in progress at 
>> https://github.com/mozilla/webpay
> 
> I knew about the client-side, but didn't know about the server-side of
> things. Very interesting, will dive into it in the coming weeks.

It's still very two-party centric (a merchant must be in full alignment with the payment provider service).

> 
>> In the future, Mozilla is very interested in pursuing a
>> decentralized payment model that works securely for all parties on
>> the web and is quick and painless for users.
> 
> ... and we're very interested in working with Mozilla to make this
> happen. I've been in contact with Ben Adida, who is working on the
> Persona stuff - we've had a few exchanges on the identity mechanism that
> would underlie a decentralized identification mechanism that could be
> extended to support payments. The PaySwarm stuff has an extensible
> identity mechanism, we're trying to see if we can integrate that with
> Persona so that you can login with Persona (who then can transmit your
> payment provider to the merchant) and then complete the transaction
> using PaySwarm. There's a great deal of potential here... would love to
> discuss it in more depth with you as the months go on.

Cool. We have learned a lot from what Ben's team has built in the Identity system. The concepts are similar for payments but the problems are very different. Austin King from the Identity team had done some early experiments on building a decentralized payment system using Persona concepts https://github.com/ozten/cream

-Kumar

Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2013 14:08:36 UTC