Enabling commerce on the Internet

For several years, electronic commerce has been a much-touted goal for the Internet. Not long ago, the Internet was used primarily for research, with access limited mainly to the university and research communities. But network service providers and commercial online services have opened it to a much larger user community. Many companies have set up corporate Web pages, and we have started to see credit cards and other monetary instruments used to place orders over the network. The Internet is increasingly becoming a venue for conducting the commerce previously carried out by other means, and for offering new commercial online services