- From: <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2014 12:56:25 -0400
- To: Web Payments CG <public-webpayments@w3.org>
Thanks to Dave Longley for scribing this week! The minutes
for this week's Web Payments telecon are now available:
https://web-payments.org/minutes/2014-08-27/
Full text of the discussion follows for W3C archival purposes.
Audio from the meeting is available as well (link provided below).
----------------------------------------------------------------
Web Payments Community Group Telecon Minutes for 2014-08-27
Agenda:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments/2014Aug/0066.html
Topics:
1. IGF 2014 - The Payments, Policing, Privacy Paradox Workshop
2. Australian Internet Governance Forum
3. Credentials CG
4. Use Cases: Initiating Payments
Action Items:
1. Tim Holborn to contact Stephane Boyera about Credentials CG
being added to Web Payments IG Charter.
Chair:
Manu Sporny
Scribe:
Dave Longley
Present:
Dave Longley, Manu Sporny, Pindar Wong, David I. Lehn, Timothy
Holborn, Evgeny Vinogradov
Audio:
https://web-payments.org/minutes/2014-08-27/audio.ogg
Dave Longley is scribing.
Manu Sporny: Any updates/changes to the Agenda?
Pindar Wong: Nope
David I. Lehn: Nothing from me.
Manu Sporny: If we could get an update later from Tim Holborn on
his experience at the Australian IGF, that would be good. We
should also discuss the first Credentials CG call.
Topic: IGF 2014 - The Payments, Policing, Privacy Paradox Workshop
Manu Sporny: Pindar sent a link to the mailing list about IGF
Manu Sporny:
http://igf2014.sched.org/event/781846f97d253b11129ee88f4dd176ff?iframe=no&w=i:100;&sidebar=yes&bg=no#.U_3l3lTHkgk
Manu Sporny: There is a youtube channel with a playlist on
people that have submitted videos
Manu Sporny:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmwV_GNAvYmA4Qtssit6_U5AgLGYodxtI
Manu Sporny: We have videos from Louise Bennett from BCS, Jeremy
Malcolm from EFF, Mary Bold from Accreditrust, and an intro video
I did
Pindar Wong: I had a video done last week, unfortunately the
wrong format, having that reviewed, my goal is to get the most
out of the audience, i'll be the moderator so will be focused on
keeping the discussion going. I'm a little concerned about
finding another moderator for the online portion. I just wanted
to make sure that/point out on the this call we are separating
the tech and policy issues. We're trying to get a much wider
sense of what some of the inputs should be to the technology side
of things. The IGF is actually the interplay between the two
(tech + policy). Tuesday, I drafted an online survey which I will
submit for review, after the 1.5 hour session those who want to
continue the discussion. I'd also like to collect some
statistics, using the survey on the use cases themselves.
Manu Sporny: There's an agenda there on the schedule, first an
intro to web identity by panelists, then review some use cases we
have, that's group discussion for 30 minutes, then privacy,
regulatory concerns 30 minute discussion, then gov't input for
around 15 minutes.
Manu Sporny: That the same agenda you're looking for?
Pindar Wong: Yes, changing that would be problematic, but i'm
open to seeing the responses from the room
Pindar Wong: It's group work, it's not a panel presentation.
We'll benefit from getting a meeting of the minds. We want to get
the best input from the experience in the room. We can then
highlight some of the issues by going through the use cases, that
might help ground the discussion.
Manu Sporny: My concern is what happens if we have deadspace
between discussions or if people are being shy hopefully we can
help prime the discussion, i don't know if this is really a
problem at the IGF, the sessions i went to last year had no
shortage of people speaking, maybe my concern is misplaced, maybe
we don't need as much prep, maybe we don't need a long list of
questions to ask the audience.
Pindar Wong: My role as moderator is to keep the discussion
going.
Pindar Wong: Sorting through people's opinions, that will be
difficult. G getting a sense of the room and the relevant topics,
anonymity, high-value payments and identity, etc. What i am
concerned about is getting the right mix of people in the room
and that can only be done on the ground in Istanbul. I know for,
example Mark Nottingham will be there. The IGF experience is that
we'll have the right people there at the conference. I'm not
concerned with dead time, but my role as moderator is to fill
that with questions
Pindar Wong: You shouldn't have to worry too much with your prep
and just share your experience
Pindar Wong: Some of the stuff you wrote in the last 24 hours in
the credentials CG, for example, is really good
Pindar Wong: I do have one slide that is exhaustive that is my
own view, where people can jump off and i'm hoping we can include
the questionnaire in that.
Pindar Wong: Getting people to participate with the survey will
be hard, but let's just keep it loose don't stress too much.
Manu Sporny: Any other comments or questions about next week's
IGF?
Timothy Holborn: At the last years IGF there was a question
about copyright around media companies, like the MPAA. There was
talk of privacy, and how the internet would be regulated. I got
the feeling that there's pressure coming from the MPAA and there
aren't broadly aware of linked data and privacy topics and what
sort of opportunity there is to create solutions.
Manu Sporny: A quick follow up on that, someone from the RIAA
(David Hughes, VP of Technology, RIAA) will be there at the
workshop next week, so we should make sure to engage them as much
as possible.
Manu Sporny: He's heavily involved in this space... it will be
good to have that from the copyright policy side of things.
Timothy Holborn: It's a problem for every internet user, they
may think of themselves of an individual beyond the needs of an
organization, in the knowledge economy all entities have value.
The the lack of understanding of linked data at AuIGF was pretty
enormous.
Manu Sporny: Outside of the semantic web community many people
don't know or understand how Linked Data works, there's quite a
bit of education and outreach we have to do in this area.
Topic: Australian Internet Governance Forum
Timothy Holborn: AuIGF in australia went very well.
http://www.igf.org.au/venue-schedule I spoke / participated on
the “Is the digital age facilitating global citizenship?” panel,
and received remarkable feedback.
Timothy Holborn: My main points that i brought forward, related
to the concept of ‘what is the web you want’ (following from the
Web We Want momentum, campaign, etc.)
Timothy Holborn: I arranged different questions relating to the
use of W3C standards, getting across this notion of the Web we
Want, which surfaces the rationale of why Web 3 is important. It
provides opportunities for traditional systems Web 2 did not.
Today, I was asked to state in one of the forums there were a
range of people involved in UN activities, and one of the ideas
that was floated was the idea of an international Web parliament.
Some of the greatest minds at AuIGF were not very technical. A
lot of people thinking about it from Web 2 point of view not Web
3. What opportunities exist when you don't need central silos
anymore. These are the opportunities that web payments provide.
Manu Sporny: I think that at least reflects our experience with
the IGF meeting last year, there's a pretty big divide between
the technical understanding and the policy discussion, but that's
exactly why we're going to the IGF to bridge that gap of what
types of policies we should be aware of
Manu Sporny: Thanks tim, you have some follow up to do?
Timothy Holborn: An enormous amount of follow up and looking
forward to working with all of you on it. I was happy to see much
more Australian participation, it was a great day.
Manu Sporny: Thanks Tim, if there is nothing else on AuIGF then
we'll continue with the agenda
Topic: Credentials CG
Manu Sporny:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2014Aug/0011.html
Manu Sporny: We had a very good turn out for the first meeting,
we had ETS (Educational Testing Systems) who proctor 5 million
students through SAT, etc. college type tests, we had OpenBadge
Alliance a Mozilla spinoff for badges of achievement, etc., we
had the former Chief Information Officer for the state of Iowa,
he's very well known in gov't. We had a number of consultants
from private sector, we had Bailey from the web payments
community to write about tech/edit specs, etc.
Manu Sporny: We run those calls exactly like we run these,
minuted, we have audio for it.
Manu Sporny: The call next week is canceled next week due to
IGF, but the week after we'll go through use cases and
requirements.
Manu Sporny: We'll be handing the identity use cases over to
that group and there's a larger consortium of groups that want to
see that work move forward, which is what we want, a broader
coalition working on that stuff.
Timothy Holborn: We haven't listed a liason relationship with
that group in the Web Payments IG charter:
http://www.w3.org/2014/04/payments/webpayments_charter.html
Dave Longley: Not in that language, but there is a section on
identity there. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Timothy Holborn: Well, it's listed here, but not in the charter:
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1H3guwrrYZALQR91iB7QzN1n4ViUnIKgVT6bZiRuyenI/edit
Dave Longley: There is a section on reviewing identity systems,
see if new technology needs to be created, it's essentially what
the Credentials CG is working on. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Timothy Holborn: The Credentials CG is not in the liaison
section.
Dave Longley: Oh, you're right.
Manu Sporny: We should ping Stephane and get him to add it.
ACTION: Tim Holborn to contact Stephane Boyera about Credentials
CG being added to Web Payments IG Charter.
Topic: Use Cases: Initiating Payments
Manu Sporny:
https://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/wiki/UseCases#Initiating_Payments_.2F_Wallet_APIs
Dave Longley: Right now we have - Use Case: A merchant
advertises different details, such as price, for an offer of sale
based on potential payment processor choice.
Manu Sporny: So feedback from Jorge: It makes a lot of sense, and
it happens a lot in online games, but maybe it would be hard to
define or predict 'potential choice' if the user is not even
registered but just browsing several sites to compare prices and
make an actual choice.
Manu Sporny: Input from Michael Williams: the two above that
allow the merchant to limit who can be a payment processor seems
like it would kill any small payment processors. i'd like to see
the ability to be your own payment processor as a use case. given
that there still needs to be a trusted third party between
merchant and buyer, maybe a middle ground is to allow the buyer
to choose a major payment processor listed by the merchant as a
trusted proxy for their preferred payment processor.
inter-processor transactions seem to be supported:
https://web-payments.org/specs/source/web-payments/#the-decentralized-settlement-process.
Manu Sporny: Let's take jorge's comment first
Manu Sporny: Jorge's primary concern here is that it becomes
difficult for the customer to actually figure out what the actual
price is before they start initiating the transaction, which is
true, we could talk about the magical future where these offers
are auto-processed by the browser and shows you prices specific
to you, rather than a generalized price, so you see the full
price (plus tax, etc) immediately
Manu Sporny: There are two levels of addressing this problem,
the first level is to not address his concern and say we're just
talking about the merchant to be able to provide an offer for
sale, it's just data, it's up to the user agent to figure out how
to show it to the user, the other potential response is to say
we've got offers on a page and we're thinking of writing another
spec to indicate how browsers should display that information to
a potential customer. I don't think we should do this, but for
example, if Google knew who all your payment processors were then
when you search it could show you a very customized search result
for all the prices for you, etc. for example if you only pay in
Bitcoin then everything you see in Google would be priced in
Bitcoin, etc
Manu Sporny: Or if you did Bitcoin and yen you'd see prices in
both
Timothy Holborn: Is currency covered elsewhere?
Timothy Holborn: For example, what happens if the merchant is
also the shipping company?
Manu Sporny: The merchant can list multiple offers for sale, for
example, if you're using payment processor X you get a discount,
or it costs more, or the merchant can offer things for sale in
yen and euro
Timothy Holborn: Is there still an issue with chargebacks on
paypal
Manu Sporny: This use case isn't about chargebacks
Timothy Holborn: Someone might try something high up? If the
list of the merchants is incorrect?
Manu Sporny: Let's just take a credit card as an example. The
merchant would price it higher because there might be
chargebacks, vs. Bitcoin with a lower price/value exchange where
there are no chargebacks.
Dave Longley: We should keep in mind that this may not work at
all w/ credit cards (there are agreements that don't allow you to
change price based on credit card) [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Timothy Holborn: I'm not sure if you can separate what sort of
instrument you're using
Timothy Holborn: Is Paypal a different sort of financial
instrument to a credit card vs. bitcoin?
Timothy Holborn: I'm not sure of the legalities of setting
different prices
Manu Sporny: There are agreements in the US where most merchants
are not allowed to give discounts for cash if you also accept
credit cards, it's in their credit card agreement. So burden is
placed on the customer, if you pay for cash, you pay a higher
price than if the credit card system didn't exist (in effect).
Dave Longley: There are also fights between different credit
cards as well... for example AmEx may charge a different fee vs.
Visa/Mastercard - different fee structures, it's a gray area.
[scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Timothy Holborn: I think we should separate the technical
problem from the business problem. We should be giving people a
choice.
Pindar Wong: You've got to separate tech from business problems,
this is very important in this case.
Manu Sporny: I think you hit nail on the head Tim, we should
provide the option, some countries will be able to use it others
will not
Timothy Holborn: +1
Dave Longley: I think all we can really do now is ensure that
the information is available in the offer of sale. We don't know
how the user agents are going to interface. As long as the offers
are in a standard format, that's what we need. [scribe assist by
Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley: I think the PaySwarm specs already cover this
right now - different offers can be made for different payment
types. We're not going to be able to easily say we can support
the "clients see prices specific to them", we don't want
merchants to shotgun prices all over their pages (visible to
people). I'm in agreement, we can only put the information in the
offer right now. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley: I don't think we're going to satisfactorily
respond to Jorge's feedback. There are two ways to respond to
this - we can't really respond to this, it's not something we can
do in the first version. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny: If we wanted to do something about this it requires
a pretty nasty stack of software to do it
Manu Sporny: There are multiple ways this could work. The
assumption that Jorge is making here is that the merchant is not
going to have any sort of information on the customer so they
won't be able to show them a price that is custom tailored to
them, they won't see that price until they click the buy button.
I think that's a perfectly reasonable assumption to make.
Manu Sporny: If we assume the merchant knows nothing about the
customer, then the smarts have to be built into the customer's
software.
Manu Sporny: If we are going to do that, then we have to create
some kind of price-fetching API that links to your payment
processor
Manu Sporny: Or we have to say that this piece of information on
the page is a variable and here is the offer and hand that to the
user agent to let them calculate it and put it on the page
Manu Sporny: So i think the response to Jorge is: Yes, this is a
problem, we do just fine today without giving the customer an
exact price before going to their payment processor. It doesn't
change the state of things (status quo), but in the future, once
there are these offers on the page we can figure out some way to
link what's on the page to the offers that are embedded on them.
Manu Sporny: But that's a whole other spec and i don't think
it's something we want to do
Dave Longley: In the meantime, browsers might do that
automatically. Browsers could take the information and show the
price. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley: We already have this built into the Payswarm
specs. You can request a quote from your payment processor, but
we'd need more to interface w/ a user agent (browser).
Manu Sporny: Yeah, you'd need a whole API for displaying prices
on a page given the customer's payment processor information.
Manu Sporny: The thing we want to focus on is the expression of
the linked data offer so we can focus on that in the future
Evgeny Vinogradov: This is really about looking for a
description of a product for sale. The offer - a few things can
be added to it, taxes, shipping fees and so on, discounts based
on payments processors, etc. It's not about finding the optimal
offer just about describing the discount/offer. It is only about
adding a few more lines to an offer, not complicated in the
general case.
Manu Sporny: I think that's exactly right, we don't want to get
into the technical details of it now, like does a merchant create
multiple offers or just one offer with all of the possible
options in it? Does the offer contain a coupon code, etc. all
that, we're talking about a data expression problem not a UI
problem and I think Jorge is concerned about the UI problem.
Timothy Holborn: What if the payment processor was also a
shipping company.
Timothy Holborn: Rather than getting the product shipped by the
merchant and the payer gets it shipped by the payment processor
for the same txn. That perhaps wouldn't happen at all if we
weren't able to offer this functionality?
Timothy Holborn: This is all non-trivial work, we could have an
entire Working Group focused on just product offers.
Manu Sporny: Everything we're discussing revolves around the
ability to express different offers, i think the use case needs
to change at this point
Manu Sporny: I think the use case is about more than being able
to just list different prices based on payment processor
Manu Sporny: I think we're really talking about parametric
offers, you pay different prices based on discounts, shipping, a
whole host of things, a merchant provides different offers based
on discount codes, payment processor choice, etc.
Timothy Holborn: Parametric pricing is a fantastic term. This is
a whole field, this would indicate it's non-trivial work.
Manu Sporny: We need to be careful not to let this distract us,
we could spend months on it, we just want to figure out the first
set of parameters we want to support and expand later.
Pindar Wong: Could we do it the other direction, for example a
Bid?
Manu Sporny: Yeah, we've discussed this smart contract stuff
before. It's something big happening in the cryptocurrency space
now. We haven't spec'd any of that out yet, it's a different
negotiation process, a different payment flow.
Manu Sporny: Basically, an Offer is something a merchant puts on
their site. A Bid is something a person puts on their blog. Then,
for example, Google or Yandex could come along, get all the Bids
and match them up to offers. You could also transmit a bid to a
decentralized network of sorts. This all falls under "smart
contract" territory, which is fairly new, and we should wait for
the dust to settle there before trying to standardize on
anything.
Manu Sporny: The whole bit about finding all the bids and offers
is probably a version 2 thing.
Manu Sporny: You at least need an Offer mechanism for that to
happen. Someone places a bid on internet/web and someone makes an
offer and sends directly to the software agent operating on
behalf of the person.
Manu Sporny: For the bidding process to happen you need a
functioning offer process
Pindar Wong: Got it
Dave Longley: Another way to look at it is that a bid may just
end up being a counter-offer. The merchant's software could
accept that and match it up to their offer and accept. [scribe
assist by Manu Sporny]
Timothy Holborn: Where do we mention v2 use cases?
Manu Sporny: We have a section on the wiki for it, at the
bottom.
Manu Sporny: I'll try to add all this stuff (add v2 use cases)
and modify the use case to talk about parametric offers.
Timothy Holborn: Assessability and what is required for that is
important - what's the value of the bid.
Manu Sporny: Let's chat quickly about Michael William's concern,
that this favors large payment processors. He's right, it does
right now and we don't have a clear solution. We did start
PaySwarm out by saying that there would be a decentralized
clearing process. The banks aren't interested in that part of the
work, as far as we can tell. Just look at the trouble that Ripple
and Bitcoin are facing when it comes to adoption at big banks -
we all know that sort of stuff is the future, but if we threw
decentralized clearing into this, it would probably not fly. So,
we need a way for small payment processors to compete, but how do
merchants accept payments from small payment processors? How do
they trust that their money is there? Ultimately, I think we're
going to have to have some decentralized payment system as an
option for the smaller players. So, you either trust the top 10
payment processor digital signatures on the digital receipts, or
you can trust a small payment processor digital signature because
you can check to see that the payment went through almost
immediately via some decentralized query. The question is, is
there a body that ensure that these small payment processors are
liquid? How do you stop bad players, companies that go bankrupt?
So, there is a big policy side to this discussion, and right now,
we don't have a good answer for Michael other than "We know this
is a problem, we will have failed if we don't increase
competition in the space." We'll have to start a discussion
around this on the mailing list.
Manu Sporny: That's it for the call today, the call for next
week is canceled. We'll start again the week of September 9th.
Pindar Wong: Thanks everyone!
Received on Wednesday, 27 August 2014 16:56:51 UTC