Vicarious certification and billing agent for Web information service

In this paper, we describe the concepts and implementation of agent providing vicarious certification and billing methods in World Wide Web. The object of vicarious certification is to provide open interface to users (clients) for using World Wide Web information service. The billing agent has enhanced functions: usage based mini payment method, vicarious billing management instead of each CPs (Content Provider), which gives reduction of costs needed for billing management. Our approach works with every WWW browser on every system. No additional software has to be installed at the user's computer or CP's server side.