World Telecommunication Day 1999 |
In the early years of the next century, electronic ''highways'' in the form of high-speed copper and fiber optic connections will take over from roads, rail and shipping as the global trade routes of the 21st century. In this new era of on-line trading, the security and reliability of the networks used to support electronic commercial transactions will be paramount. Corporate users will need to be able to trust such systems to handle their core business and financial operations with absolute dependability. Customers, meanwhile, will need to feel as comfortable surfing the Web sites that serve as virtual boutiques as they did browsing the storefront windows that have characterized retail trade for most of this century. Finally, user confidence in the security of digital payments and the privacy of personal or corporate information needs to be at least as high as it is under the ''old-fashioned'' systems we have in place today.
The successful development of electronic commerce requires resolution of issues including privacy, security, electronic signatures and authentication or consumers rights, to name but a few. One of the areas the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is devoting attention to is authentication involving electronic signatures and certification authorities and the mutual recognition across borders of digital certificates.
An immense amount of work has already been invested in developing the secure technical interfaces that will be essential to the mass acceptance of e-commerce. ITU recommendations such as X.509 now lie at the heart of almost all digital authentication and certification systems, ensuring the secure validation of the digital signatures that protect the privacy of information traveling over public networks. A wide range of other ITU standards are already playing a key role in supporting other elements of public key encryption, digital coding, audiovisual authentication and secure, encapsulated messaging.
But even with these technical standards in place, there remain important problems of policy and regulation that threaten to hamper rapid uptake of e-commerce on a global scale. In the realm of digital certificates, for example, systems exist at the national level. Yet there is currently a lack of clear guidelines for transactions that take place across international borders.
In some transactions, this problem is reduced by specific agreements between buyers and sellers. For example, on-line vendors sell their wares via closed-end transactions - the seller states the terms and conditions under which a buyer may purchase goods, and the buyer pays using a credit card that incorporates its own set of terms and conditions under which the seller will be paid. However, this kind of system will not be practical for the many future on-line transactions that involve an open-ended model - for example, the signing of a lease or contract through the Internet - nor for transactions involving direct payment by digital cash rather than by credit card.
In these situations, the rights and obligations of traders - and sovereign states - are currently unclear. Are nations obliged to honor the electronic authentication procedures of other nations, even if they do not match their own? How should international disputes involving on-line purchases be resolved?
Today, only about 10 countries have laws on electronic certificates, signatures and other authentication devices, and some of these do not address the issue of foreign certification. While other countries and regional organizations, such as the European Union, are currently working on defining frameworks for managing international commerce over the Net, there is an urgent need for global harmonization of the mechanisms that will ensure safe and secure electronic trading across international borders.
As an impartial, global organization with nearly 135 years of experience developing the world's communications infrastructure, the ITU represents the ideal forum in which to forge a workable, internationally accepted solution to the pressing problem of international e-commerce authentication.
With a view to achieving global consensus on the frameworks under which tomorrow's e-commerce infrastructure will operate, the ITU has established a special Experts Group, bringing together leading specialists from government and the private sector, including telecommunications carriers, software developers and e-commerce merchants, as well as experts from national regulators and academia. This group, which will meet in Geneva in December, will study the issues and try to develop proposals for an international approach to authentication on public networks.
The result, it is hoped, will be a system that promotes free and open access to e-commerce networks, ensuring the new trade routes function smoothly, reliably and equitably, to the benefit of communities the world over.