World E-Commerce Summit Meeting Planned

Seventy companies active on the Internet have agreed to establish what they called a “Global Business Dialogue” to resolve obstacles to the development of electronic commerce.

Spurred by the European Commission during a day-long meeting in Brussels of
the Business Round Table on Global Communications, the group agreed on a
meeting in the first quarter of next year to offer solutions to the problems
posed by taxation, tariffs, intellectual property rights, encryption,
authentication, data protection and liability, according to an IDG.net Industry Standard report.

“We all have one objective: to develop clear answers to the challenges of
online electronic commerce,” Thomas Middlehoff, a member of the board of
Bertelsmann AG, was quoted as saying.

The idea for the meeting came from European Industry Commissioner Martin
Bangemann. He aims to involve industry in proposing solutions for regulating
e-commerce, in the hopes that governments will then more quickly implement any needed changes in legislation or practices.

Participants are expected to include major publishing, retailing and banking
concerns, as well as IBM, Microsoft, Netscape and various telecommunications
companies.