Re: Dealing with the NASCAR Syndrome for Web Payments

On 04/15/2014 11:14 AM, Dave Raggett wrote:
> Web Intents assumes the browser plays the role of broker between 
> providers and consumers of services.

PayPal was very clear about this being an issue for them during last
years W3C Technical Plenary:

https://web-payments.org/minutes/2013-11-13-workshop/#topic-3

The idea that a browser would become the mediator for a payment
transaction concerns organizations that are not browser vendors. Google
and Apple might like the idea of browser-mediated payments, but most
banks, Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal would probably not like that because
it allows them to be dis-intermediated pretty easily.

That said, there may be a happy balance, but in order to reach that, we
need to get those latter non-browser companies involved.

> Synchronization across personal devices is devolved to the 
> proprietary synchronization mechanisms  provided for browsers from 
> the same vendor.

Yeah, seems like some way of having personal details (like payment
provider, credentials, preferences) stored in the cloud and sync'd
between all browsers would be useful. This is one such technical
solution for that problem:

http://manu.sporny.org/2014/credential-based-login/

> There is a lot of work on wallets, but right now, web pages are 
> strongly coupled to wallets, so we have a NASCAR problem for web 
> developers in listing all of the wallets and all of the independent 
> payment solutions that the web site supports.   This points to the 
> need for an open standard that decouples web pages from wallets and 
> payment solutions, and which minimally constrains how wallets and 
> payment solutions are implemented, e.g. locally or cloud-based.

+1

This group has been aware of and has been working on that problem
(NASCAR for login, payment provider) for some time now:

http://manu.sporny.org/2014/credential-based-login/

https://web-payments.org/specs/source/identity-credentials/

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/

Received on Wednesday, 23 April 2014 01:07:44 UTC