NetBill was developed at Carnegie Mellon University by Doug Tygar and Marvin Sirbu. NetBill offers an electronic payment scheme for buying goods and services securely over the Internet. The transaction protocol is especially designed to handle low cost items, e. g. journal articles at 10 cents a page.
The protocol also ensures that both the consumer and merchant are protected: the consumer is guaranteed of the certified delivery of goods before payment is processed, and the merchant is guaranteed that the consumer cannot access the goods until payment has been received. This is achieved by delivering the goods to the consumer in encypted form, and only sending him the decyption key after payment.
NetBill acts as a third party to provide authentication, account management, transaction processing, billing, and reporting services for network-based clients and users. With a NetBill account and client software, users can buy information, software, CPU cycles, or other services from NetBill-authorized service providers, under a variety of payment schemes. NetBill acts like an electronic debit card service to provide financial services in support of electronic commerce.