A highly distributed architecture for implementing payments for access to pay-per-view information offered on a network, especially the Internet. The architecture includes elements that not only collect payment for access to the pay-per-view information but also make possible a refund of the payment in case a consumer requests and is granted a refund. The architecture allows for monitoring the conduct of consumers and information vendors to detect behavior that might be unscrupulous. The architecture also includes elements that provide for compensating an advertiser for advertising pay-per-view information provided by an information vendor and for recovering the compensation in the case of a refund. The architecture scales to meet consumer demand by allowing for many of the kind of element in the architecture responsible for the more computationally intensive work of arranging for access to the information, and of charging for the information.