Futures

Real Time

The idea of using the World Wide Web as a tool for accessing other information sources is already plentifully evident. One extreme view its that it may end up supporting all such services, including access to video on demand.

Billing

Before the Information Businesses are able to move their operations onto the WWW completely, they need to have assurances that they can bill. There have been two approaches emerging:

1. Give people the information and trust them to pay if they use it. This relies on being able to police un-authorised copies in the network.
2. Use an out-of-band mechanism to secure a credit card or other means of billing someone by conventional means, and issue them with a sequence of one time use keys with which they can retrieve the amount of information they have paid for. This stops browsing, which is a fundamental strength that the WWW structure permits.