By Nick Patience
The rather dry but economically important problem of regional and national jurisdictions is perhaps the major obstacle threatening to halt, or at least slow down the internet commerce juggernaut. Jurisdictions need to be defined in terms of privacy, trademarks and their impact on domain names and perhaps most importantly, taxation.
To that end, the chair of a new International Chamber of Commerce committee to look into e-commerce legal issues, Scott Blackmer says the group will produce an ICC policy statement by the fall making best practice recommendations for governments, and companies doing business online, both with other businesses and with consumers.
Blackmer, a lawyer with the Washington DC firm of Washington DC firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and a renowned privacy expert chaired the first meeting, which was held at ICC headquarters in Paris on April 30. He says it was attended by about 40 lawyers and academics and about 70 in all have agreed to contribute to the project, largely via email. In addition to the ICC, the experts are drawn from bodies including the OECD, American Bar Association, Internet Law and Policy Forum and Global Business Dialogue on Electronic Commerce, among others.
The group will start by gathering together the various problems in the e-commerce world caused by aggressive or unpredictable assertions of jurisdiction. It will then make recommendations on issues including party autonomy – the right to agree on which state or national law will apply to an electronic contract, recommended disclosures concerning commercial web site owners and their physical world addresses and the special considerations that need to be employed when applying traditional issues of regulatory jurisdiction to goods and services delivered electronically.
