Towards a generic per-fee-link framework

Abstract

Low value electronic content is not being offered following a model in which the content is accessed clicking in a new sort of links called per-fee-links. The goal of these links is making the (micro)payment of a web content as simple as possible: just by clicking on a link. Despite this model has been proposed as an approach to pay low-value content on the web, we do not find any existing framework following that model. As a response to this need, we propose a new framework based on three main components. First, a session-oriented protocol that is independent of the application protocol used (HTTP, FTP ...). It does not only support the per-fee-links model but also other models such as pay-per-data, pay-per-time, etc. Second, we describe how to define a per-fee-link. Finally, we mention the set of functions that should be supported by a wallet in this framework.