At a meeting of experts at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the assembled eggheads concluded that the ITU is well-placed to help standardize authentication for e-commerce. Fred Cate, a professor at the Indiana University School of Law, said the group agreed that the ITU was well placed to help facilitate electronic authentication. Its chief qualifications are almost universal country membership and long experience in negotiating the sticky politics of cross-border telephone networks. The rationale for the move is that telecommunications companies themselves need standardized approaches to such issues as the policy statements of certification authorities.
The experts advised the ITU to encourage voluntary, rather than mandatory, approaches to standardization, and that it should focus on areas where international dialog is needed. They further recommended that the ITU should take a technology-neutral stand and that it should not impede the development and implementation of market-based standards. Industry groups in rich countries don’t want to give up their hard-won privileges. Speaking of which, the experts called on the ITU to pay particular attention to the needs of developing countries, where the lack of standards could prevent markets growing or put corporate profits at risk. E-commerce has reached a stage where it is critically important to agree on international approaches in the areas of electronic signatures and authentication, Cate warned, if we don’t want to see the emergence of fundamentally discordant standards.
