Liberty Alliance Adds MasterCard

Liberty Alliance Adds MasterCard

MasterCard International has joined the Liberty Alliance, a group of companies that have partnered to cooperate on Internet commerce standards. This adds to Liberty's membership roster of wide-ranging providers of consumer and industrial products, financial services, travel, digital media, retailing, telecommunications and technology.

Also in the Alliance are: Bank of America, Gemplus, Schlumberger, Sony Corp., United Airlines, American Airlines, GM, Travelocity, American Express, AOL Time Warner, Nokia, Sprint, Cingular, Hewlett-Packard, The Apache Software Foundation, O'Reilly and Associates, Cisco and Sun Microsystems.

One of the goals of the Alliance is to design a blueprint for passing data online and set a road map to address business practices, privacy, consumer adoption and technology evolution.

Eric Dean, President of the Alliance's board of directors and CIO for United Airlines, said the partnership will face the challenge of developing a single set of standards on which companies offering such different services, products and approaches to technology will agree.

Dean said that Microsoft, which makes .Net Passport technology systems for secure electronic commerce, has declined to join the alliance so far.

The Liberty Alliance Project is a collaboration of varied businesses and industries formed to give customers more uniform, easier Internet access from POS terminals, credit cards, wireless phones, computers, televisions and automobiles. Consumers will need to sign on only once, and from then on they will be able to securely surf and shop on the Web sites of Alliance members.

Formed in September 2001, the Alliance will develop and deploy an open source for network identity, resulting in the single-sign-on process for consumers.

Dean said a set of protocols could be ready in a year, and companies could be releasing the first compliant systems six months later.