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University of New South Wales Law Journal |
Welcome to this, a special edition of the UNSW Law Journal which explores the legal, regulatory and public policy issues central to the development of electronic commerce.
As we approach the new millennium, electronic commerce is emerging as a key engine of economic growth in developed economies. Electronic commerce provides opportunities for business to reach global customers and gain access to new markets; create new products and services; realise new sales opportunities; lower costs; reduce inventories and cycle times; provide more efficient and effective customer service and increase productivity.
With our increasingly computer literate society and advanced telecommunications infrastructure, Australia is well placed to `punch above its weight' in the information economy. The Federal Government is committed to building:
Whilst changes must be made to laws and regulations to accommodate electronic commerce, there need not be a legal revolution to match the technological one. In many areas of law and policy, only minor changes are called for to allow electronic commerce to progress along the same lines as traditional commerce.
In the process of developing an appropriate level of regulation, governments need to be guided by certain principles and objectives:
The global network technologies which underpin electronic commerce create a borderless world which challenge our existing national policy frameworks. This was recently highlighted at the OECD Ministerial Conference in Ottawa, A Borderless World: Realising the Potential of Global Electronic Commerce.
OECD Ministers concluded that international cooperation is an important aspect of policy development for the digital age and that "whether the action is domestic or regional, private or public sector, all electronic commerce policies and activities will have limited impact unless they facilitate a global approach."
Ottawa conference participants discussed the issue of trust in electronic commerce, recognising that consumers and business will not fully embrace electronic commerce until they are confident that services and networks are secure and reliable, that transactions are safe and private, and that redress mechanisms are available.
A key theme which emerged from Ottawa was the tendency towards hybrid regulatory solutions which balance social and equity principles with economic concerns about regulatory burdens. For example, in the area of consumer protection, various approaches are being developed to implement and enforce consumer protection principles in the on-line environment, including legislative or regulatory, self-regulatory, technological or contractual mechanisms.
The Australian Government's overall regulatory objective is an internationally consistent legal framework that will:
This framework brings together many policy areas for addressing the interests of business and consumers, all of which I am pleased to see are covered in this special edition of the Law Journal: security, privacy, electronic signatures and authentication, protection of intellectual property (while guaranteeing important educational benefits from free Internet access), consumer protection, Internet content standards and taxation administration.
Let me illustrate some of the approaches being adopted by the Australian Government to increase confidence of Australian consumers and businesses in electronic commerce. The Federal Government is:
The legal profession is increasingly participating in these issues. The authors and readers of this special edition of the University of New South Wales Law Journal are among the professionals who will be contributing further to the design and implementation of these issues in electronic commerce law: the commercial and consumer framework for the Information Age.
I congratulate the editor and board of the Journal, as well as the distinguished authors of the various articles in this edition, for their ground-breaking contribution to legal and policy analysis in the new, complex and exciting area of electronic commerce.
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/UNSWLawJl/1998/25.html