The present inventions provide an integrated, modular array of
administrative and support services for electronic commerce and
electronic rights and transaction management. These administrative and
support services supply a secure foundation for conducting financial
management, rights management, certificate authority, rules clearing,
usage clearing, secure directory services, and other transaction related
capabilities functioning over a vast electronic network such as the
Internet and/or over organization internal Intranets. These
administrative and support services can be adapted to the specific needs
of electronic commerce value chains. Electronic commerce participants can
use these administrative and support services to support their interests,
and can shape and reuse these services in response to competitive
business realities. A Distributed Commerce Utility having a secure,
programmable, distributed architecture provides administrative and
support services. The Distributed Commerce Utility makes optimally
efficient use of commerce administration resources, and can scale in a
practical fashion to accommodate the demands of electronic commerce
growth. The Distributed Commerce Utility may comprise a number of
Commerce Utility Systems. These Commerce Utility Systems provide a web of
infrastructure support available to, and reusable by, the entire
electronic community and/or many or all of its participants. Different
support functions can be collected together in hierarchical and/or in
networked relationships to suit various business models and/or other
objectives. Modular support functions can combined in different arrays to
form different Commerce Utility Systems for different design
implementations and purposes. These Commerce Utility Systems can be
distributed across a large number of electronic appliances with varying
degrees of distribution.