The day before Democrat presidential candidate Vice President Al Gore heads to New Hampshire to talk about the high-tech economy, his office unveiled a new working group to study ways to eliminate regulations that are acting as obstacles to further e-commerce growth.
Under the initiative, the group will solicit comment from local, state and government agency officials, as well as the private sector, on what they see as regulations that need to be removed or reformed to ease the flow of online transactions. The group will be a subset of the Administration's Interagency Task Force on Internet Commerce, and will be headed by Commerce Secretary William Daley.
"To meet the full potential of the new medium, we must look ahead and clear away the 20th century barriers that may inhibit 21st century commerce," Gore said in a statement.
As part of the White House framework on e-commerce, the administration has already called for the government to look at ways to remove regulations that are barriers to e-commerce. A senior administration official said there was a desire to highlight the problem and that is why a separate working group was created to study the issue.
On Dec. 7 the administration plans to formally unveil an update to its framework, detailing its progress in promoting e-commerce, an administration official said.
With the working group on e-commerce obstacles, the administration expects to look at commercial laws written before the Internet age, such as requirements that businesses keep paper records of transactions, or rules that impose specific technical standards or licensing for a transaction to be legally completed.
"No one has done an entire closet cleaning on this and we don't know what we'll find. We may find existing laws…need to be updated…or legislation may (be needed) to remove barriers," said a senior administration official.
Among the biggest obstacles to electronic commerce, according to the business groups, is the lack of legislation on digital signatures, export controls, encryption and privacy concerns. Rick Lane, U.S. Chamber of Commerce director of congressional and public affairs, said "action speaks louder than words" and the administration could make a "huge step" toward eliminating barriers to e-commerce, if it signed a digital signature bill.
For Becca Gould, vice president of public policy at the Business Software Alliance, removing export controls to encryption products would be the biggest facilitator of e-commerce.
While the high-tech and businesses groups welcomed the administration's efforts to ease e-commerce, one saw the working group as proposing "nothing new."
"I see this as mainly political, a sort of laying out of a campaign document," said Mark Uncapher, vice president and counsel at the Information Technology Association of America.
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