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A protocol designed to standardise
electronic payment transactions on the internet. As anyone who has bought
things from more than one website will testify, most internet
retailers use their own complex and incompatible systems for financial
transactions, agreeing only on the encryption standards. The Internet
Open Trading Protocol (iotp) tries to recreate some of the accepted
practices that govern real-world buying and selling, complete with
subtleties such as the way a transaction is conducted, the presentation of
offers and the delivery and receipt of goods.
Theoretically,
iotp should make life much easier for consumers, who will be able to use a
consistent interface for buying and ordering goods and services, as well as
for merchants and banks, who will have more consistent ways of collecting
and processing payments. In practice, it is likely to be a long time before
it is widely used. Bodies implementing new internet standards do not always
share users' views about consistency and ease of use, and many good ideas
like this have yet to be usefully implemented anywhere. A further problem is
that successful retailers have become fiercely protective of their own
patented shopping and trading mechanisms and may not embrace attempts to
make them behave in the same way. |
