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Summit Eyes Future Of E-Commerce
by William New
The Third Summit of the Americas in Quebec last weekend may not have been as hard-hitting inside the room as outside where the protestors were, but it did give a picture of where e-commerce stands in the Western Hemisphere.
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien sounded bothered by the end of the summit, partially blaming the Internet for the protestors' level of organization. "I guess in other summits there will still be some protestors," he said in the closing ceremony. "They communicate among themselves on the Internet and so on, and they have the right to protest. But we will not tolerate breaking the peace of the people. In a democracy, you have a right to speak, but you have to respect the law."
The good news for supporters of the summit centerpiece, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), is that all but one of the hemisphere's 34 democratically elected leaders still favor the agreement taking effect by December 2005. Venezuela was the only country to oppose that timeline.
Training Techies And Closing The 'Digital Divide'
But leaders had little of substance to announce at their summit, at which they discussed everything from drugs to democracy to business deals. President Bush announced a fellowship program for training information technology managers from the hemisphere in U.S. business practices. The Commerce Department will seek candidates over the next six weeks, according to a department official.
The program may benefit people in the high-tech, Internet, hardware, express-mail and banking sectors, the official said. "We're looking at this quite broadly, trying to make it a profile."
Efforts to increase connectivity, or access to the latest technologies, "pervaded" the whole summit, the Commerce official said. It was a factor in discussions on issues such as education and health. Barbados Prime Minister Owen Arthur, who addressed the needs of small economies, lauded the commitment in the summit declaration to put more resources toward closing the so-called digital divide through the "connectivity agenda."
"Nothing matters more to us than to be able to leave a conference where there is a commitment to a plan of action to put the new information and communications technology within the reach of the people of the hemisphere," he said.
Latin America is the world's fastest-growing Internet market, with nearly 9 million people online in 1999 and nearly 30 million expected online by 2003, according to the Commerce Department. The fastest-growing Latin American markets are Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile.
The FTAA negotiation process includes an e-commerce experts' group that does not formally negotiate but may be growing in importance. Leaders agreed to continue the group, which must now determine its work plan for the next year-and-a-half.
That plan will include closing the digital divide, sources said. The group's recently released report from the previous 18 months identifies e-government, customs issues, consumer protection and alternative dispute resolution as other areas of interest, the Commerce official said.
Next On The Trade Agenda: Chile
In the ongoing bilateral trade negotiation between the United States and Chile, the next round of talks will be held in Santiago from May 10-16. At the summit, Bush repeated his wish to finish negotiations this year, on a parallel track to his winning congressional approval of presidential trade-negotiating authority, which the administration calls trade-promotion authority. "I am confident I will have trade-promotion authority by the end of the year," Bush said.
The U.S.-Chile negotiating meetings will be somewhat regular from now until the end of the year, roughly one a month, with the following weeklong meeting scheduled for June. U.S. officials tabled proposals at the last meeting that will be discussed in May. Those proposals built off the bilateral agreement with Jordan now before Congress, looking at specific trade issues such as pricing, technical neutrality and regional forbearance, the Commerce official said.
Negotiators of other bilateral subjects also will address e-commerce issues such as the adoption of copyright treaties under the World Intellectual Property Organization, express-carrier shipments, and webcasting. "We're not looking to take all the ideas related to e-commerce and force them into the chapter on e-commerce," the official said.
A day after the summit's conclusion, meanwhile, Canada and Costa Rica signed a bilateral trade agreement that includes a strong section on competition policy and side accords on environment and labor. It also includes a joint statement on e-commerce cooperation, which covers consumer protection, e-government, security, privacy and market development.
Europeans Wants A Piece Of The E-Pie
Elsewhere, the European Union continues to mull how to get more Europeans to buy from the Internet. On Monday, European businesses gathered under the European Commission's e-confidence initiative to draw conclusions on principles for "good practice" in e-commerce. E-commerce accounts for just 1 percent of retail sales in Europe despite attempts to raise confidence.
Erkki Liikanen, the European Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society, continues to beat the drum for e-commerce. On Monday, he evangelized its benefits to small and medium-sized businesses in Brussels, saying, "The new challenge is that efficient e-marketplaces can be developed in Europe."
WTO Chief Seeks New Round Of Talks
Mike Moore, head of the World Trade Organization, this week appealed for a new round of negotiations as a way to lift the world out of technology-related economic gloom. Big exporters to the United States, especially of high-tech goods, are in trouble from the economic slowdown, he said.
Copyright Office To Address Online Trade Disputes
The U.S. Copyright Office announced in an April 23 Federal Register notice that it is holding a full-day public forum May 15 on the controversial intellectual property components of the draft international treaty on jurisdiction of online trade disputes. The treaty, called the Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters, is being negotiated under the Hague Conference on Private International Law. The next round of informal governmental negotiations on the treaty began today in Edinburgh, Sweden. Formal talks begin in June.
Internet Uber Alles
Register.com, one of the largest providers of global domain-name registration and Internet services, has become the first U.S. registrar to launch automated registrations for domain names with the German country-code domain extension .de.
The domain has more than 4.3 million registrations to date, making it the most popular in the world after .com and .net, the company said. Registrations will go through an alliance with German Internet service provider Online Now. The German domain registry DENIC prevents entities outside Germany from directly interfacing with the .de registry, setting it apart from .com, .net and .org, the company noted.
A Call To Embassy Duty
Bush this week announced his intention to name Stephen Brauer to be U.S. ambassador to Belgium. Brauer is chairman and CEO of Hunter Engineering. Bush also said he would name career foreign service officers Donald McConnell and Richard Henry Jones to be U.S. ambassadors — McConnell to Eritrea and Jones to Kuwait.
South Africa To Consider E-Commerce Law
South African Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri said last week that his government plans to introduce a new e-commerce law by the end of the year, Reuters reported. The new law would address issues such as consumer protection, privacy, e-commerce taxation, cyber security and intellectual property protection.
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