Discussing E-Business Issues

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1. What are the legal and regulatory ramifications of operating an e-Business?

An E-business is a vague term that embraces all of the changes undertaken at companies that seek to take advantage of the Internet, the Web, email and a host of associated Internet technologies and protocols. At the moment companies are transitioning to e-business. By the end of this decade all companies will be more or less e-businesses. Most of the legal problems are mainly linked to the contracts (customer identification, authentication, electronic signatures, conclusion and validity of the contract), payments and after-sales service. There are also other problems like sharing personal information with third parties, scams, hacking passwords etc.

Among these problems two of them have major importance. One of them is the problem of verification of the identity and the age of the potential customer. For B2B and B2C transactions it is of the utmost importance to be 100% sure of the identity of the partner and this problem increases with cross-border transactions. Every country has its own procedure. But this involves certification and the procedure and the costs are today different from country to country, resulting in different security levels. The age problem is especially important in sectors, which deal with goods or services forbidden to minors (DVDs, alcoholic drinks or similar goods, but also online services like betting agencies, lotteries, or gambling service providers). In all these cases competitors could use provisions of unfair competition to sue and stop the online service, if the service providers cannot guarantee that only adults buy certain goods or use certain services.

The second, but not less important, problem is with regards to data protection and criminal prosecution. This problem concerns the ambivalence between data protection and the requirement to give information to criminal prosecution authorities. On the one hand, every service provider is obliged to ...