Brokers and intermediation for the info-underworld

This paper discusses the concept of information brokerage as a range of intermediary services between consumers and information sources. These services are considered in the context of an increasingly commercial information trading environment, including the necessary legal requirements for online commerce. This is not a proposal for brokerage-it is a scenario for how brokerage may organically evolve; what drives its development, and its role in the developing services needed to support information services (viz the evolving Internet) on top of the traditional PSTN/ISDN. The paper considers the construction, deployment and management of future networked information services, and considers the scenario of service deployment following a net centric component ware paradigm; this assumes a trading environment where services are composed of third party provided service components which are subject to commercial procurement. The paper then develops this scenario to consider information services as online businesses which are autonomous and continually reassessing their own market environment. The fundamental conclusion is the increase in the requirement for intermediaries, and specifically information brokerage. It is argued that the commercial environment and the scale of the evolving Internet can't survive without intermediation. This also applies to the management and support of the communications networks themselves in this fertile services environment.