The UK parliament’s Trade and Industry Select Committee yesterday slammed the government’s Electronic Commerce Bill, saying it is unduly burdensome and would hinder rather than encourage the development of electronic commerce in the UK. In its first report on the bill, the committee condemned the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) proposals for the statutory licensing of so-called trusted third parties as not fit to be written into law and warned that if they were carried through they would be a damaging and embarrassing failure. On the key escrow proposals, the part of the bill which has received the most attention, the committee said it could see no benefits from government promotion of key escrow or key recovery technology, concluding that the key escrow and related law enforcement issues should not appear in the forthcoming bill.
The committee, which is made up of government ministers, industry representatives and other experts, has been studying the bill since December. Its report has now been submitted to the DTI, which is expected to respond in a few weeks.
The bill has proved highly problematic for the government which received strong objections from industry and civil rights groups alike, eventually forcing it into a consultation period in March. This latest criticism of the bill could be the last nail in the coffin over key escrow and calls into question the value of passing the bill at all in its current form. Chief executive officer of LINX, the London internet exchange, Keith Mitchell, said the report is consistent with what [industry] has been saying for some time… the government should now just scrap the Bill and return to the drawing board. Caspar Bowden, the director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIRP) which has followed the progress of the bill closely and objected to it strongly, welcomed the report as a relentless castigation of squandered opportunities, loss of political control, and unaccountable policy failures in the face of near unanimous public and industry condemnation. Bowden, echoing concern in industry that the government did not really understand the technologies it is attempting to legislate on, called for the creation of a high-level technically trained staff team to coordinate e-commerce policies across government departments.
The bill had originally been expected to provide a platform for the UK to grasp a European lead in e-commerce adoption. But the controversy that has surrounded it has torpedoed these aims. The committee said that the bill had become long entrapped in the key escrow issue and as a result the UK’s reputation for electronic commerce had been severely damaged.
However, the committee’s chairman, Martin O’Niel MP, claims all is not lost. The UK is still the hub of traffic from the US into Europe and we will be meeting with officials in Washington to discuss how best to take things forward and will be following up today’s report with recommendation on the next step… if we take the right decisions at the right speed, there is no reason why the UK cannot still become a center for electronic commerce, he said.
