Aspects of European regulation of e-commerce

Abstract

Electronic commerce has been defined as 'any form of business transaction in which the parties interact electronically rather than by physical exchanges or direct physical contact'. The world of electronic commerce revolves on buying and selling goods and services and carrying out supportive transactions such as customer service and aftercare. It all happens in a spatial vacuum: not physically on any territory but in cyberspace. Electronic commerce developed first as a business-tobusiness phenomenon but has, over the years, become increasingly oriented towards business-to-consumer – electronic retailing, a category that has grown with the advent of the World Wide Web (www). 'There are now shopping malls over the Internet offering all manner of consumer goods from cakes to wine to computers and motor cars' providing 'an unprecedented opportunity for organizations of any size to reach a global customer base over the world wide web. As it has been aptly put, 'Electronic commerce has implications for many facets of our economic and social life because it has the potential to fundamentally change the way commercial transactions, the business of government, the delivery of services and a host of other interactions are conducted, raising issues at the heart of policies directed at the regulation of traditional practices and procedures. How will these changes impact upon the law, both nationally and internationally? The pace is indeed breathtaking. According to the 1997 OECD Discussion Paper Dismantling the Barriers to Global Electronic Commerce, electronic commerce was predicted by most analysts to increase by a factor of ten by the year 2000. Early last month, the Financial Time􀁥 reported a US research company as stating that the volume of business transacted over the net will this year reach $180 billion. Notwithstanding this the electronic commerce market still remains relatively small in comparison to other types of commerce That is still a fraction of what can, and will undoubtedly, be achieved.