Re: agenda+ Proposed changes to draft Web Payments Working Group Charter

On Thursday 2015-07-30 17:35 -0500, Ian Jacobs wrote:
> I received comments from Apple that I believe improve the draft charter, and I think it is worthwhile
> having the changes in the charter when we send it to the Membership for review. I believe the
> changes are in line with our intentions. I also want the IG to have an opportunity to review them.
> 
> I have made the changes to the editor’s draft of the charter:
>   http://w3c.github.io/webpayments-ig/latest/charters/payments-wg-charter.html
> 
> You can compare with the draft we reviewed on Monday:
>  http://www.w3.org/2015/06/payments-wg-charter.html
> 
> Here are my edits:
>  https://github.com/w3c/webpayments-ig/commit/3ae5a43f5e2e38622440eca2384fea1508e8e6dc

I think the combination of these edits (3ae5a43f) and the edits made
on Monday in revision 32cca1af have reduced the scope of the group
in a way that I consider dangerous.

The previous edit (32cca1af) removed the phrase:
  as well as the external actors that will interface directly with
  them
from a sentence that, at the time, began with:
  The scope of the charter focuses on
This edit (3ae5a43f) now changes:
  The scope of the charter focuses on
into:
  The scope of the charter is
which in turn makes the sentence a definition of the charter's
scope rather than a description.  The entire sentence is now:
  The scope of the charter is the interaction between payer user
  agent and payee Web application.

This is problematic because it requires that a payer user agent be
part of a closed system in order to implement the standard.  In
other words, a user agent that wants to use this standard has to
have a nonstandardized protocol for interacting with payment
instruments (likely involving business deals with payment networks
or banks), and any payment network / payment scheme that wants to be
usable in any particular browser likewise needs to make a deal with
that browser (or the wallet software that it defers to) to be usable
in the browser.

This also contradicts the deliverables list of the charter, in that
there are deliverables outside of that narrow scope (as I think
there should be).

The scope of the working group should also include interaction
between the payer user agent and the payment scheme.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)