E-COMMERCE OFFSHORE NEWS
In a bid to wrest monopolistic control of the
telecommunications industry in this small Caribbean island of 12,000 from UK
telecom giant Cable and Wireless, the government recently approved draft
legislation to liberalize the industry and allow competition by year-end.
Well-known for its network of Net-savvy entrepreneurs, the private sector
has been working with the government to make the nation a viable force in
the highly competitive e-commerce offshore industry. However, high prices and restrictive Internet policies by
C&W have hobbled Anguilla’s efforts to attract e-businesses. The new
legislation is designed to change all that.
The legislation has four simple but essential
goals;
- To create an open market for the provision
of facilities and services and conditions in Anguilla’s
telecommunications sector in support of the continued development of
tourism, financial services and information-based services on the
Island.
- To satisfy the requirements for reliable,
high quality and affordable telecommunications of sufficient capacity to
transmit the ever increasing quantities of information needed for the
production of these quickly evolving services.
- To develop information-based and financial
services industries in Anguilla will require a highly specialized and
trained workforce. Implementation of high-speed data networks easily
accessible to all citizens and residents will facilitate access to the
best and most up-to-date training available.
- To add support to the emergency measures
that are in place to facilitate preparedness for hurricanes and other
disasters.
Summary
of Legislation
http://gov.ai/telecommunications/summary.htm
Full
Report
http://gov.ai/telecommunications/
SUMMARY
A
four-year optical network project by Global Crossing Ltd. that connecting
200 cities in 27 nations was completed when the service provider hooked up
Lima, Peru, to its South American cross-connection, company officials said
last week.
Hamilton, Bermuda-based Global Crossing sells
networking and telecommunications services to corporate customers and other
carriers.
In a statement Friday, Global Crossing CEO
Tom Casey attempted to parlay successful completion of the network project
into good financial news. The announcement came amidst news that competitor
360 Networks had filed for bankruptcy protection in both the US and Canada.
"Global Crossing's business plan is
fully funded, including receipt of over $3 billion in after-tax proceeds
from the [Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier] sale closing June 29," he
said.
Global Crossing is in the process of selling
its local telephone business to Stamford, Conn.-based Citizens
Communications Co. for $3.5 billion.
Global Crossing's carrier customers include
Deutsche Telekom AG, British Telecommunications PLC, Telecom Italia SpA and
Qwest Communications International Inc.
Its corporate customers include Procter &
Gamble Co., Merck & Co., Sony Corp., Pfizer Inc., Microsoft Corp., NEC
Corp. and American Express Co.
"Unlike many other competitive carriers,
Global Crossing has proved able to pass through the peak of its funding
needs," said analysts at New York-based Merrill Lynch & Co. in a
report.
The new network gives Global Crossing "a
strong source of competitive advantage in its pursuit of large commercial
and carrier customers globally."
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/06/26/global.crossing.completed.idg/index.html
SUMMARY
In a
strange quirk of fate, the Internet may be breathing new life into an
ancient currency -- gold.
Several Caribbean-based Web companies have
begun storing gold in places like Dubai, Zurich and London and allowing
Internet users to own pieces of the metal and use it as an online currency.
So instead of relying on credit cards -- the
dominant online payment system -- people can opt for bullion-based
cybermoney, which purveyors tout as a quick, cheap and private alternative.
"We've got people using it all over the
world," said James Turk, founder of GoldMoney, a Bahamas-based online
payment business.
The advent of globe-spanning e-commerce has
allowed transactions to skip easily across national boundaries, making for
easy shopping for anyone with a modem. But most transactions in cyberspace
still involve national currencies, fraught with risk of fluctuating exchange
rates and the cost of bank commissions.
Their currency offers an international
purchasing solution that economists have only begun to contemplate: a
stable, cashless currency that offers instant purchasing power across
borders. Digital currency holders can use the Internet's anonymity to buy
things online, send money to other users or simply exchange national
currencies into cyber-gold.
But the ease of hiding ill-gotten gains in
virtual gold scares financial crime fighters and regulators, who struggle to
track shady offshore banks and money launderers.
"There is tremendous potential in using
these products for money laundering," said U.S. Secret Service Agent
Eddy Lugo, who works for the Treasury Department in Washington D.C.
So far, no digital currency business has
established bank-like standards for reporting suspicious activity, Lugo
said.
To set up an account at a digital currency
Web site, customers need only register with an e-mail address and password.
Launched in 1996 and registered on the
Caribbean island of Nevis, E-gold claims more than 200,000 accounts and more
than $14 million of currency in circulation.
On Nevis, Finance Secretary Laurie Lawrence
said authorities who registered E-gold as an offshore company still were
trying "to get a handle" on how digital currency operates and
whether to regulate it. The government of St. Kitts and Nevis is drafting
its first money-laundering regulations.
Both E-gold and GoldMoney said they are
developing safeguards, including certificates that aim to identify clients
as legitimate depositors with a clean financial record.
And because the currencies tracked by
computer, all transactions are recorded and traceable to an Internet service
provider.
"You can't build a solid business by
catering to criminals," said Jackson.
The U.S. Secret Service, which tracks
financial crimes, said it could not confirm money laundering was occurring
with digital currencies, but added that the currencies were "wide
open" to this type of crime.
Links
to Cyber Gold Currency Providers
http://www.icegold.com
http://www.e-gold.com
http://www.goldmoney.com
Full
Story
http://www.nj.com/newsflash/index.ssf?/cgi-free/getstory_ssf.cgi?f0010_BC_CyberGoldRush&&news&newsflash-financial
As companies continue to trim costs and pull
back on e-business initiatives, they may run into five 'danger points' that
could hamper growth, a new report says.
Failing To Innovate
Neglecting Dot-Com Lessons
Flying Solo ...
... a No Go
Competitive Focus
SUMMARY
Roughly
70 percent of large firms will fall prey to a handful of "significant
business traps" -- including the fumbling of e-commerce opportunities
-- that will hamper growth and perhaps destroy entire companies, predicted a
report released Tuesday by GartnerG2, a new research service of Gartner
Group.
At a time when the cooling economy is forcing
managers to reassess their business models and trim costs, GartnerG2 said
that many companies are subject to "danger points" that will
prevent them from meeting their goals.
"Whether through fear or ignorance,
business strategists are being duped far too frequently by thinly veiled
growth traps and are greatly impeded in their ability to lead their
businesses through recovery and on to growth," Gartner president and
chief executive officer Michael Fleisher said.
However, those companies that manage to
leverage the Internet's potential will grow earnings by 30 percent to 80
percent per share, depending on the industry, GartnerG2 said.
Chief among these growth traps, said the
study, is the unsupported belief that some industries will provide only slow
growth, which leads managers to avoid innovation.
For example, the study said that while many
managers have turned to geographic expansion in the search for growth, that
effort alone will guarantee failure.
Instead, the firm said, innovation can be
achieved through any method that offers added value to consumers, such as
improved products, services or deliveries.
According to the report, a second key
"danger point" is misunderstanding the lessons of the dot-com
shakeout.
"It is true that some companies
misapplied the Internet, focusing only on price, while others rushed into
ill-advised partnerships and some had no business value at all,"
GartnerG2 said.
GartnerG2 also predicted that alliances and
partnerships will replace mergers and acquisitions as the preferred approach
to improve productivity, acquire new core competencies and enter new
markets.
Failing to make key alliances is a third
"danger point" facing businesses, the report said.
According to the study, successful
collaborations can help businesses share the risk of new ventures and
satisfy increasingly complex customer demands.
Meanwhile, Amazon's deal with Borders gives
Borders a "top-notch" Web presence and allows Amazon to sell
customers books online for collection at a local Borders branch, the firm
said.
"Failure to keep abreast of competitor
innovations, new market entrants, substitute products and industry shifts
can sound the death knell for a business," said GartnerG2.
At the same time, the study said that
businesses need to take action only if doing so will strengthen their
company, and not "just because competitors are doing it."
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/11184.html
An ocean separates North America from the E.U
in more ways than one. The two continents take vastly different approaches
to their growing e-commerce economies as well. Where North America has
adopted a hands-off approach to taxation of e-com transactions to date, the
EU seems eager to tax the new medium to support a growing bureaucracy known
for punitive and outdated taxation mandates. Thankfully, there is some
opposition to this socialist trend. The only question is, how long will it
last?
SUMMARY
In
the battle to start taxing sales of downloadable items in the European Union
(EU), the score is 14 countries in favor of the tax and only one – the
U.K. – opposed.
But in this battle, a minority of one nation
is enough to win, because in the EU tax proposals must have unanimous
approval.
Currently, the EU does not impose a
value-added tax (VAT) on items such as software, music and videos sold as an
Internet downloads by non-EU companies.
However, European companies selling the same
items must collect the tax, and critics say this puts European suppliers at
a disadvantage. Under
the current proposal, products delivered electronically by non-EU companies
would become taxable in the EU nation of the consumer. And,
of course, there is strong sentiment that taxes would hinder development of
e-commerce.
This means that currently a consumer buying
downloaded software priced at 100 euros from a non-EU supplier pays only 100
euros. But if the consumer buys the same
product from a German supplier (Germany's VAT is 16 percent) he would pay
116 euros, while a Danish supplier (25 percent VAT) would charge 125 euros.
The European e-Business Tax Group (EeTG),
formed in 1999 to develop what it calls "practical, clear and fair
solutions for the taxation of e-business," strongly supports taxing
sales digital products. European-based
businesses who are members include natives such as Ericsson, France Telecom
and Siemens, but also include foreign companies with large European
operations, such as Cisco, Microsoft, IBM and Sony.
Ine Lejeune, spokeswoman for EeTG and also
for PricewaterhouseCoopers, which coordinates EeTG, told Newsbytes the group
was not happy with the U.K.'s most recent roadblock to the tax.
"For the whole (EeTG) group, it is a
feeling of disappointment," she said, adding that the issue has now
dragged on for more than two years.
http://www.elcom.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=373
Phil Zimmermann became the world's first
cyberspace hero 10 years ago in June.
In a public move, which transformed the way
Internet users viewed privacy and made him the target of a federal criminal
probe, Zimmermann released Pretty Good Privacy on June 5, 1991.
SUMMARY
For
the first time, PGP allowed PC users to encode their files and e-mail
messages using state of the art encryption algorithms.
While the clunky, buggy PGP 1.0 had its
problems -- Zimmermann didn't know it at the time, but the original version
was vulnerable to crypto-savvy codebreakers -- it was still far more popular
than even the most optimistic observers could have imagined.
By the time version 2.0 was released in
September 1992, Zimmermann had earned the enmity of RSA Data Security, which
owned a patent that PGP arguably infringed upon, and the adoration of
thousands of grassroots users who finally had a reliable, if not especially
convenient, way to preserve the privacy of their e-mail conversations.
A former anti-nuke activist, Zimmermann
intended PGP as a method for other activists to communicate securely.
Another friend, Kelly Goen, uploaded it to
Usenet the following day, reportedly taking the extreme precaution of
driving around the Bay Area and connecting to it with a laptop and an
acoustic coupler modem.
In those early-Web days, Usenet was a key
distribution channel for source code and binaries, and PGP appeared almost
instantly on servers outside the U.S., prompting the government to launch an
investigation of Zimmermann that lasted for five years.
After the Justice Department announced on
Jan. 11, 1996 that they were abandoning the prosecution of Zimmermann and
Goen, Zimmermann created a company called Pretty Good Privacy Inc., to
market his software commercially.
But fame in the cyber-rights community never
translated into business success, and Zimmermann sold his nearly broke
business to Network Associates a few years later.
As a senior fellow at Network Associates,
Zimmermann began to have clashes with executives over the direction of PGP.
In a sad irony, even though far more people
use the Internet today, a vanishingly small percentage of e-mail is
encrypted before it's sent.
Explanations include the U.S. government's
largely abandoned attempts to regulate encryption and RSA Data Security's
patents that only expired in September 2000, but the most likely reason is
that encryption programs are still too hard to use and don't come as
standard equipment with e-mail software.
One current project: An encrypted Internet
phone system written in the Java programming language.
"My secure phone product in Java is
making some progress," he says.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,44324,00.html
In an in-depth study of 60 countries from
across the world, the U.S. has emerged as the nation most ready to benefit
from the e-commerce revolution. The
Global e-Readiness report, conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit and
its Pyramid Research subsidiary, assesses 60 countries'
"e-readiness" using a mix of six key categories: Internet
connectivity, business environment, e-commerce adoption, regulations and
laws, supporting e-services, and the social and cultural infrastructure.
SUMMARY
Japan,
despite its high-tech economy, languishes in 18th place, categorized as only
a "contender" rather than an e-commerce leader.
Australia outstripped all the European
countries to rank as the second most e-ready country behind the U.S.
Meanwhile, the world's other major global powers, Russia and China, are way
off the leadership scale in 42nd and 49th places respectively.
The study, released last month, is designed
to give both national policy makers and information technology (IT)
executives of multinational firms insight into the true market conditions
for new Net services around the world.
The technological experience that exists in a
target market is only part of the equation, experts say: Local business and
social conditions often make the most difference to strategic success.
"The first thing multinationals must
look at is where the international e-focus of their strategies should be.
These results are not just about technology, and are not always consistent
with other analyses," says Denis McCauley, Pyramid's director of
Europe, Middle East and Africa research. "Multinationals may well be
the driving force behind the new global economy, but they are still subject
to local regulatory issues."
These results are not just about technology,
and are not always consistent with other analyses," says Denis
McCauley, Pyramid's director of Europe, Middle East and Africa research.
Not everyone agrees with the EIU's findings
that the U.S. has the pre-eminent position in the global e-sector. IDC, a
research firm based in Framingham, Mass., worked with publisher World Times
on its own 2001 worldwide e-readiness rankings, which showed the U.S. coming
in at fourth place in the global list--behind a Scandinavian trinity of
Sweden, Norway and Finland.
IDC uses a set of key criteria for its
assessments with more of a technology bent. Its rankings are based on four
infrastructure categories: computer, information, Internet and social
factors. The U.S. falls foul on most counts. It ranks only 10th in the
Internet category, well behind the leaders Sweden, Singapore and Australia.
It manages only ninth place in information infrastructure, behind Taiwan and
the Netherlands, and it's back in 17th place in the social category, well
behind Denmark, Norway, Hong Kong and Japan.
Where the U.S. stands out is in computer
infrastructure, though Australia and Singapore are hot on its heels. It
manages only ninth place in information infrastructure, behind Taiwan and
the Netherlands, and it's back in 17th place in the social category, well
behind Denmark, Norway, Hong Kong and Japan.
While the exact positions of various
countries may differ, the general conclusions of both the EIU and IDC
reports come through clearly.
North America, Northern European countries,
Australia and Singapore are becoming the true leaders of the global
e-commerce economy, and they are potentially the most valuable e-services
markets.
"And there are serious impediments to
allowing new competitors to get involved in developing these broadband
services for the future."
Although it is Europe's largest economy and
also its largest IT market, Germany ranks only 12th on the EIU e-readiness
list.
These shortfalls in potential may be partly
the result of the dominance of the English language among the EIU rankings.
The EIU report has three other key
conclusions: Liberal national policies on e-development and competition are
paramount, especially in telecommunications.
Furthermore, the EIU report found that
neighboring countries may have very different positions on the globally--for
example, Australia is second but New Zealand is No. 20--which underscores
the need for highly targeted corporate e-commerce strategies in many
regions.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2773824,00.html?chkpt=zdnn_nbs_hl
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