Abstract We present a proposal for a next‐generation Internet based on chargeable Web Services and Utility Computing realized by a series of open but interacting markets. We demonstrate through the U.K. e‐Science project ‘A Market for Computational Services’ the development of some of the fundamental building blocks for such a Grid computational marketplace. This paper describes the motivation behind this restructuring of the Internet and Web‐based activities as a series of markets and how Grid Computing technologies can contribute towards this goal. The paper details the work undertaken at the London e‐Science Centre to build a framework to create and support negotiable and chargeable Web Services. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The move towards Service Grids, where services are composed to meet the requirements of a user community within constraints specified by the resource provider, present many challenges to service provision and description. To support our research activities in the autonomous composition of services to form a Semantic Service Grid we describe the adoption within ICENI of web services to enable interoperability with the recently proposed Open Grid Services Architecture.