EU Ready to Sign Off on Digital Signatures
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
emarketer.com
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, 2000 AUG 11 -- By Sylvia Dennis, Newsbytes
The European Union (EU) expects to shortly approve plans to create a global digital signature-based system called Identrus. The Union announced today that interested parties have one month to comment on the system before it is rubber-stamped.
The announcement is the closest indication to date that the EU is ready to parallel the electronic signature legislation passed by President Clinton earlier this summer.
Originally founded in April, 1999, by ABN AMRO, Bank of America, Barclays, Chase Manhattan, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Hypo Vereinsbank, Identrus is a global business-to-business (B2B) network that supports authenticated and normally irrefutable transactions.
To do this, Identrus requires each member bank to certify their corporate customers as trading partners on the Internet. To provide a high level of security, each partner will be required to use digital signatures.
Since the Identrus consortium was notified to the EU for regulatory clearance in April of last year, it had been joined by Australia and New Zealand Banking Group , Banco Santander Central Hispano , CIBC WMC, HSBC Financial Services and NatWest.
The EU is known to have been mulling the plan on two fronts: firstly, the B2B issue of anti-competitiveness, and second, as to the legality of e-transactions.
Until a few days ago, experts had been expecting the EU to rule against major B2B portals and networks on the grounds of their being anti-competitive. However, the surprise Aug. 8 approval for MyAircraft.com, an airline B2B portal, suggests otherwise.
The plan with Identrus is that partners will use the network infrastructure to conclusively identify one another through their financial institutions, ensure their communications are secure, and create an indisputable record of their transactions.
With these capabilities, Identrus members will be able to conduct Internet business with confidence, opening new markets around the world and lowering their transaction costs.
Uniquely, the Identrus infrastructure is open to financial institutions, their corporate customers, system providers and security vendors around the world.
While the EU has admitted that it is concerned about the anti- competition aspects of Identrus, it noted in its press statement that each participant in the network is free to set the prices it charges to its end users.
"The EU has recognized the importance of the establishment of such services for the development of e-commerce," said the statement, adding that, at stake is the need to provide authentication and related electronic transaction security services to end users.
"The transactions concerned may be financial or commercial, such as purchases and sales of goods or trading in financial instruments, potentially all over the world," the statement went on to say.
According to the EU, the certification system "is open to other financial institutions and will interoperate with other systems being developed by financial industry ventures, postal authorities and telecommunications carriers among others."
Against this backdrop, the EU says that interested third parties now have one month to submit their comments before the Identrus joint venture is formally approved.
Identrus' Web site is at identrus.com.
Reported by Newsbytes.com, newsbytes.com. |
