Like innovators in the bitcoin space, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is seeking to solve e-commerce's persistent problems of high friction and fraud rates through its new Web Payments Interest Group, announced on 15th October.
Proponents of digital currency have been enthusiastic about the launch, expressing optimism that the non-profit dedicated to establishing consensus for open web standards – founded by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee – would embrace an innovation that itself has been heralded as the Internet of money.
Expectations aside, project lead Stéphane Boyera told CoinDesk that while W3C is open to considering how bitcoin and block-chain technology could play a role in these discussions, the group doesn't immediately see bitcoin as something that could enable its objectives short term.
Boyera asserted that the W3C is concerned first and foremost with making payments easier for merchants and consumers today, and that means bringing together existing payments stakeholders from the banking, finance, telecommunications and web industries.
Drawing on conclusions reached at the group's preliminary meeting this March, he said:
"One of the first things we identified was not trying to change the way payments are done today, but just focusing on the connection between existing payment systems and web applications."
Boyera said that members of the digital currency industry, including Ripple Labs, had been present, but that the event mainly served as a way to gather the various parties involved in online payments. All agreed there had previously been no good forum they could use to communicate about what is a prevalent issue.
Still, there are hints that, while the discussion of the group is still being framed, the bitcoin industry could assert itself in the process through greater involvement.
"The charter of this group that we are creating is still very broad," Boyera said.
Web payments vision
W3C head of marketing and communications Ian Jacobs told CoinDesk that the goal for W3C will be to standardize APIs for different transactions within web applications and web pages, adding that W3C is currently engaged in a number of similar projects with similarly ambitious goals for expanding the web.
"There's an automotive group that's out there looking at how to bring applications into the automobile," he said. "That group is trying to figure out the common set of things that developers will need to have access to so they can design an API that works on any car."
The idea in establishing a common API for payments, he explained, is that wallet developers, for example, would only have to write an API once. With a common standard, this API would then be useful everywhere – whether a user was accessing it on a watch or a desktop.
"A website owner can put something up on a web page with confidence that, whatever payment solutions they have available to them, whether its credit card or PayPal or whatever, it will just work. The sites won't have to provide 12 options and users won't have to do 12 things," he explained.
More specifically, Jacobs said that the core topics that will be addressed are increasing interoperability and security around digital wallets, and identifying and authenticating those who are making payments.
"There is no standard way for increasing trust between the web applications, the user and the wallet," he said.
source-http://www.coindesk.com/wc3s-web-payments-redesign-bypass-bitcoin/
