[Ecommerce] CPT comments on Barriers to Ecommerce

[James Love]

April 13, 2000

To: ebarriers@ita.doc.gov
From: James Love, Consumer Project on Technology, http://www.cptech.org,
love@cptech.org
Re: CPT comments on Barriers to Ecommerce

Subgroup on Legal Barriers to Electronic Commerce
U.S. Department of Commerce
14th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., 
Room 2815, Washington D.C. 20230. I

1.  The US PTO should not issue business practice patents.

Business practices should not be the subject of government monopolies. 
There is no way the staff of the US Patent and Trademark Office should
be asked to judge prior art, novelty and utility of business practices,
and no way that business models should be protected by legal monopolies.

If the USA grants these monopolies, but they are not recognized in other
countries, US businesses will be prevented to doing things that will be
legal outside of the US.  Put this in an Internet context, and you have
a recipe for all sorts of problems.


2.  The Internet's top level domain space should be greatly expanded,
and there should be a diversity of management models for TLDs.  

Right now we have 244 ccTLDs like .fr, .uk, .ch, .tv, .md, etc, and 7 so
called "generic" top level domains (gTLDs).  Of the gTLDs, 3 are
unrestricted, and 4 are restricted.  The .us ccTLD is almost unusable. 
If I wanted to create an organization on .us, it would have to be
something like cpt.washington.dc.us, and the name of the organization
would be on the 4th level domain.  

The existing .com, .net and .org space is now very extensively mined,
and lots of groups cannot find a name that makes sense and is short and
easy to type.  This could easily be fixed with the approval of new
TLDs.  Technically, there could be hundreds of thousands of TLDs, rather
than 251.  The problems are all political, and not technical.  

ICANN is the group that is supposed to deal with new TLDs.  It is
riddled with conflicts of interest, and many  groups are trying to block
any new TLDs, to protect the existing registry cartel.  See for examples
the comments of the .ch (China) ccTLD at the end of the note at this
URL:

http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/random-bits/2000-April/000139.html

If we could expand the TLD space, businesses and organizations could
better protect their legitimate trademark interests.  Lotus.flowers,
lotus.software and lotus.cars would easily co-exist and not confuse
consumers.  Consumers, workers and citizens could create TLDs like
.union, .humanrights, .customers,  .ecology, etc to provide information
about company practices or citizen or worker rights.  TLDs like .organic
could be created for organic food products.  Lots of creative things
could be done.  Everything is being blocked by narrow anticompetitive
concerns that control the ICANN process.  


3.  The failure of the US government to protect privacy undermines
trust.

Only someone who is incredibly inept at research would come to the
conclusion that government regulation is not needed to protect privacy. 
There is no empirical evidence that (a) consumers don't want government
regulation to protect privacy and (b) that self regulation will make a
dent in the problem.  It is time for government officials to start
earning their salaries and deal with the difficult but necessary task
for regulating business practices that undermine privacy.

4.  The failure to address jurisdictional fora for regulating ecommerce
denies consumer protection.

Right now there are hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of rules to
protect consumers in a wide range of non--cyberspace transactions.  For
example, we regulate lending practices, marketing securities to
investors, the regulation of pharmaceutical marketing practices, privacy
and all kinds of other things.  One can quibble about particular
regulations, but unless you think that all consumer protection rules are
unnecessary, at some point you have to figure out how to resolve cross
country disputes over rules, norms and enforcement.  

The US government has not provided leadership on these issues.  This
should change.  The US government should support the creation of
something like a World Consumer Protection Organization (WCPO), modeled
after WIPO perhaps, that would at least provide a fora for discussion
these issues.  Here is one such proposal:
http://www.cptech.org/ecom/cpt-wcpo.html


Sincerely,


James Love
-- 
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James Love, Director           | http://www.cptech.org
Consumer Project on Technology | mailto:love@cptech.org 
P.O. Box 19367                 | voice: 1.202.387.8030
Washington, DC 20036           | fax:   1.202.234.5176
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