A melange of conflicting laws has put the brakes on European e-commerce, and formal collaboration between government and business is the only way out of the mess.
That was the conclusion of a report by market-research house Forrester Research.
"An effective economy needs a legal framework to function and grow," the report, "Braving EU Net Regulation," said. "The bad news is that many laws overlap or contradict each other and few people know how to apply them. The business community is dispirited."
The report pointed to the profusion of -- and lack of coordination among -- Europe's regulatory bodies. They have created a patchwork of outdated, conflicting, and confusing laws that have to be fixed before electronic commerce will take off in Europe.
"People are very frustrated, and rightly so," said Dr. Therese Torris, the report's lead author and director of new media and analysis in Forrester's Amsterdam, Netherlands, office. "They are not moving on."
Torris said that the Internet often falls under a host of different European regulations designed for different mediums, such as print, broadcasting, and telecom. Those rules can be very confusing.
Additionally, many of these laws are very restrictive, she said. For example, many European countries place caps on the amount of advertising that can be broadcast during certain programs or times. While these laws may lend themselves to TV, they fall apart on the Internet.
Torris also complained about the widespread lack of Internet knowledge among European lawyers and legislators, and the glacial pace with which regulatory bodies react to technological change.
She said similar legal conflicts often arise between states in the United States, but American lawyers and judges generally have a better grasp of the issues.
"The complexity is known," she said. "There are lawyers that deal with it and judges that know about it. European lawyers are not trained in this kind of cross-border law and judges know nothing about the Internet."
