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Comment by haseman | Hacker News Reader

One of the great things about the internet is it's always about to change.

I think these services have interesting models....but I'll be damned if I'm going to let a 'sales tax calculator' blow a sale because it goes down. A rational business cannot rely on services they can't, at least in some small way, control.

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In fact, complications in calculating sales tax cause many businesses to outsource their entire payments to something like PayPal. If instead they had a number of competing sales tax calculators and other services, one can imagine a payment platform built on a loose network of services with the ability to failover when one goes down.

Exactly. It would seem that one of the biggest problems facing the Internet and the growing dependence on Internet based services/applications is the fact that you are often fully dependent on (and at the mercy of) a single fallible system.

If our next generation of web services/applications relied on (is designed to be) a "cloud" based system, capable of dynamically switching between the multiple available services of a specific type, your users could rely on your service, regardless of what a single given service's stability or status is - one goes down, another one picks up. *trivial example: Think Twitter outages - if there was instead a redundant vanilla twitter-like messaging system, outages would not impact usability of its applications...

This said, I cannot help but wonder about the fiscal reality of such a infrastructure. In 'narrowing the delivered content more specifically to match the actual desired data' and 'its delivery mechanism' being hammered out, I can't help but wonder about the 'pay off'? Where is the mechanism that allows "content owners" to 'brand' and/or capitalize on "their" data.

But that is a different discussion altogether...

> In fact, complications in calculating sales tax cause many businesses to outsource their entire payments to something like PayPal.

How does PayPal address that problem? I don't see anything on the paypal site that concerns tax rates for different items in different jurisdictions.

Rational businesses also have to decide what work to outsource and what work to do internally. If there was a reliable provider of this service, I think many businesses would outsource it.

True, but decoupling services via HTTP just makes the fault lines more explicit. I imagine more of these services (like many of the current webhooks stuff Jeff Lindsay is putting out) will be opensource and easily adapted to virtual appliances / dedicated hosting. That way you can choose exactly when hosted vs hosting it yourself makes more sense.

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