[apps-discuss] Payment Protocols -- was Re: Proposal for a Finance Area Mailing List

Hi Carsten, 

I don't know why we have to switch to private communication here. 

While I am still trying to catch up with the mailing list discussion. From the discussion I have seen so far I believe the usual "terminology" problem showed up here. 

The title "finance area mailing list" is probably the wrong term. Instead, we are talking about Internet payment protocols. There is nothing really magic about these protocols and we have to a certain extent worked on those type of protocols already in the IETF, as some of you had stated already. Even I had worked myself on a (failed) payment protocol (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sipping-pay-06)... Of course, they may not cover all the use cases Walter probably has in mind (and I do not fully understand the long list of stated functionality myself either). 

Nevertheless, there are various groups who are quite pragmatic and have started (or even finished) their work on payment protocols. I had been approached last year by some folks from the Web identity management community who wanted to standardize an OAuth based payment protocol. Sounds crazy? Not really. Facebook is using such a protocol with their 'Facebook Credits' (see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/credits/) and so is Google with 'Google Checkout/Google Wallet'.  Just recently the OMA had standardized their new payment protocol (see http://oneapi.gsmworld.com/payment-restful-api/) focusing on the needs of their telecommunication operator community. To my knowledge all these approaches use OAuth under the hood. 

I don't know how far these attempts are away from what Walter is trying to accomplish. I believe the main disconnect is in the understanding of how the process works in bringing work to the IETF and the lack of agreed terminology and scope makes is easy to talk past each other. 

Once getting to the point of talking about the same topic there are various other challenges, such as 
* who are all the stakeholders that need to be involved? 
* are these communities interested to bring their work to the IETF? 
* are they interested in a common standard?
* are there use cases similar or where are the differences?  
* is this work likely to hit deployment (given that there were some unsuccessful attempts in the past already)?
* why did various earlier attempts fail? 

[I am particularly interested in the last item given that we see a number of new efforts showing up these days.]  

Ciao
Hannes

On Apr 9, 2012, at 11:44 AM, Carsten Bormann wrote:

> I sent Walter a private message.
> I would ask anyone out of the IETF who wants to react to this message at all, to do the same.
> 
> Grüße, Carsten
> 
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