Business chiefs call for ecommerce dialogue

Business leaders have called for greater cooperation between the private and public sectors in Europe. Without it, they claim that global ecommerce will be held back.

The call came at the end of a conference in Brussels yesterday to discuss online trading.

Martin Bangemann, EU Commissioner for Telecoms and IT, organised the meeting with the aim of creating what he called a "global business dialogue". This is designed to help public and private sector work together on advancing ecommerce.

Jochen Kubosch, Bangemann's principal spokesman, said the meeting was extremely fruitful and its participants were very keen to advance the dialogue. "It's in the hands of these private sector members now - they must develop projects and work with their national governments," he said.

Delegates agreed that the main barriers to growth are taxation, tariffs, intellectual property rights, encryption, authentication, data protection and liability.

David Weatherby, project manager at the Electronic Commerce Association, welcomed the injection of private sector input into ecommerce. However, he expressed concern that there was a lack of small companies involved in these discussions.