Who would handle customer complaints?
The experience at First Virtual Holdings is that they get every kind of customer service call possible – even though they are responsible for a very tiny part of their customer’s Internet use. Therefore a question like this is hard to answer authoritatively. We feel customer service complaints are likely to be handled most often by the billing entity. That’s one reason why we profit-share with the “home publishers”. However, I think that users will quickly recognize repeated failures on the part of specific publishers, and directly interact with them. Further, I think large numbers of complaints against a publisher will result in action by the home-site operators themselves (in this regard it is very similar to the credit card model, I think). Clickshare will be involved as a record-keeper, I think – verifying records of transactions.
