Making rules for electronic
commerce
Paris 14
November
1997 - Electronic commerce is capable of transforming business, opening
up hitherto undreamed of fields of opportunity. But to fulfil its promise, the
Internet must be subject to the same rules and disciplines that govern conventional
trading.
This was the main conclusion
drawn at the ICC’s Business Agenda for Electronic Commerce conference on
6-7 November 1997. The conference brought together government ministers and
senior officials, academics, lawyers, marketing executives and business experts
from companies that are major suppliers and users of information technology.
Participants were convinced
that the key lies in business self-regulation, backed by a sound framework of
legal jurisdiction. As George Yong-Boon Yeo, Singapore's Minister of Information
and the Arts and Second Minister for Trade and Industry, pointed out: electronic
commerce cannot flourish without law and order.
Speakers as highly placed
as Ira Magaziner, President Clinton's Senior Advisor for Policy Development,
urged the private sector to lead development of the Internet. Governments are
ill-equipped to regulate something as amorphous, pervasive and fast changing
as this frontier-defying phenomenon.<
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If there is uncertainty,
it is not about technology and its capacity to sort and filter, to verify and
validate. The big question is whether business can swiftly put in place the
self-regulatory codes and standards that will fashion order out of potential
anarchy.
Rules must be harmonized
and consistent, covering protection of privacy, intellectual property rights,
advertising ethics, trust between business partners, the validity of digital
signatures and the law of contract. If a digital signature means 150 different
things in 150 different countries, it becomes impossible to do business electronically.
Participants commended the
ICC for its new GUIDEC rules for ensuring trustworthy digital transactions over
the Internet, unveiled as the conference opened. Many urged the ICC to do more
- and fast. One speaker reckoned that business had no more than one and a half
years to demonstrate that it could control commercial misuse of the Internet
before governments stepped in to over-regulate, over-tax and over-censor.
Earlier that same week company
experts serving on the ICC's Commissions and its Electronic Commerce Project
had been hard at work anticipating the challenge. The following ICC initiatives
are in the pipeline:
The ICC's response
The ICC - because it represents
all business sectors on every continent - is already the universally recognized
arbiter on rules and standards governing paper-based trade. It reconciles diverse
sectoral, regional and national codes, standards and practices.
In the new world of cyberspace,
where there are no frontiers and no physical divisions, basic rules of the road
will be crucial to the commercial success of open networks such as the Internet.
The ICC's task is to provide those rules. It does not compete with other business
or professional bodies, but provides universal standards that all can apply.
ICC experts, all of them
from companies with international trading interests, are engaged in the following
projects:
a harmonized certification
mechanism, building on the GUIDEC rules, that will allow contracting parties
to verify their partners' identities;
guidelines for marketing
on the Internet, catering for the varied sensitivities of a global audience;
new tailor-made contract
clauses that can be applied by business partners to avoid complications arising
from differing data protection regimes;
measures to avoid abuse
of domain names and copyright on the Internet;
a self-regulatory framework
for electronic documentation, governing import and export transactions, transport
and trade finance;
links to an E-TERMS database
service providing full definitions of the legal terms companies intend to use
when they draw up contracts;
provision of effective dispute
resolution in cyberspace, to overcome associated jurisdictional problems.
For
the full ICC GUIDEC click here