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e-Commerce Law & StrategyLJN NewslettersNewsSections

Americanization of e-Commerce Law

By Jonathan Bick
December 21, 2007
Some observers ' armchair and expert ' compare the Internet to the lawless American West of yore, and they believe that, as was the analogous situation on the plains of the territories in the 1800s and early 1900s, no law, in the modern case, e-commerce law, exists. These people point, for instance, to the fact that about two-thirds of all e-mail is unwanted spam and unsolicited commercial e-mail, and that although Internet gambling is illegal in every state, millions of Americans nonetheless gamble online, generating about $6 billion in revenue for the approximately 2,000 Internet gambling sites (and remember: Internet gambling is illegal in every state).

But others ' again, armchair critics, and technowhizzes and recognized online experts alike ' see the Internet as a set of mutually agreeable protocols, and suppose that e-commerce participants apply trade law akin to their medieval trade-fair predecessors (for more on this theme, see, Bick's article in the October edition of e-Commerce Law & Strategy, 'e-Commerce Communities Employ Medieval Justice: Internet Sellers Use Extrajudicial Remedies Similar to Merchant Law'). The observers in this camp highlight the fact that participation in peer-to-peer networks remains very high despite the efforts of copyright owners to shut these forums down, and the fact that anonymous e-mail is regularly used to make false marketing claims.

Despite the Internet's global reach, it is the propensity of American citizens and U.S. residents to engage in e-commerce ' and of American courts and governmental agencies to accept, resolve and publish the decisions in those cases ' that makes it fair to say that American law dominates e-commerce.

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