NCC Members have free access to this Guideline on the Principia website.

E-commerce does not appear to be developing as rapidly as upbeat predictions would suggest.

There are a number of reasons for this. Two of them - inadequate performance and poor security on the Internet - are being addressed by a combination of technological development and agreement on standards. A third reason may prove less tractable. This is the need to develop an acceptable global legal framework for e-commerce. Issues such as taxation, data protection and privacy, protection of intellectual property, illegal or offensive on-line content, consumer protection and liability are already creating much work for lawyers and great confusion for the rest of us. At present, many of the solutions found to these issues are extemporised - for example, the moratorium on taxing Internet trade which has been adopted in the US - but that cannot continue for long. Tax moratoriums, to follow the example, can create unfair trading conditions.