NetBill: An Internet commerce system optimized for network delivered services

NetBill is a business model, set of protocols, and software implementation for supporting commerce in information goods and other network delivered services. It has very low transaction costs for micropayments (around 1 cent for a 10cent item), protects the privacy of the transaction, and is highly scalable. Of special interest is our new certified delivery mechanism which delivers information goods if and only if the customer has payed for them. This paper discusses the design of the NetBill protocol and our World Wide Web (WWW) prototype implementation.