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The group hopes to build the new service into a profitable business.

Most of these new middlemen, especially those offering services with legal liability, such as key escrow agents, certifying authorities, and pseudonymous remailers, will be pressure points for regulators the way Internet service providers are now. The Net's diversity and freedom may well depend on encouraging as many of these services to develop as possible, so that users, both corporate and individual, have as much choice as possible.

In a technical environment, the best choice may be difficult to identify. Most people are not qualified themselves to check up on the strength of an encryption algorithm or the validity of certificates offered by a particular organization. This is again a question of trust, which builds up over time--by withstanding repeated attempts at cryptanalysis in the case of the algorithm, or by cross-checking in the case of certificates. In the real world, we make these checks all the time as part of developing a trust relationship, whether it's assessing the stories in our chosen newspaper by looking for errors in the areas we know about or examining our legislators' voting records.

An attempt to resolve this difficulty and restore the trust that is being lost as the Net grows and metamorphoses into a full-blown commercial medium is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's eTrust initiative.[16] The initiative was inspired by a lecture by author Francis Fukuyama, who claims that the greater the level of trust between the parties to a transaction, the less the transaction costs. A pilot program began with a hundred companies in late 1996, using licensed symbols that tell users what happens to data collected by the Web sites they visit. Coordinated by CommerceNet, eTrust is intended to build security and confidence into the public network by creating standards for the use and collection of personal data and for security. Understanding that in a new and unfamiliar environment familiar names are worth a great deal, the project is using well-known auditing firms KPMG and Coopers and Lybrand to develop a formal review process for Web sites. Some of the new middlemen, in other words, will be some of the same ones we've gotten used to in the physical world.