Marvin Sirbu
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
NetBill security and transaction protocol
1995
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Abstract
cyberspace with no easily identifiable place of business for the merchant or physical delivery site for the customer. Transactions are subject to observation by third parties sharing the network. And the use of computers to support transactions makes record keeping easier, exacerbating privacy problems arising from transaction data collection by merchants. Supporting transactions in cyberspace requires electronic analogs for many familiar procedures from face-to-face transactions. Parties need to know with whom they are dealing, or at least verify their creditworthiness. They need to be able to negotiate prices, perhaps providing credentials entitling them to special discounts, such as a student ID. Parents need methods to control where their children shop in cyberspace. In the case of information goods, the value of an item may be as low as a few cents, requiring transaction mechanisms which impose per-transaction overheads much smaller than those for typical check and credit card purchases. Merchants need to restrict the class of customers they support based on their credentials, to restrict distribution of sensitive materials. We are building a system called NetBill which is optimized for the selling and delivery of low-priced network goods. A customer, represented by a client computer, wishes to buy information from a merchant's server. An account server (the NetBill server), maintains accounts for both customers and merchants, linked to conventional financial institutions. A NetBill transaction transfers information goods from merchant to customer, debiting the customer's NetBill account and crediting the merchant's account for the value of the goods. When necessary, funds in a customer's NetBill account can be replenished from a bank or credit card; similarly, funds in a merchant's NetBill account are made available by depositing them in the merchant's bank account. NetBill acts as an aggregator to combine many small transactions into larger conventional transactions, amortizing conventional overhead fees. The transfer of an information good consists of delivering bits to the customer. Users may be charged on a per item basis, by a subscription allowing unlimited
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