SAN FRANCISCO -- Trust is the intangible force sustaining the Internet economy, e-commerce policy maven Elliot Maxwell said Monday at a Hambrecht & Quist technology conference.
"As I read the analyst reports and the valuations your companies are commanding, they are based on these [high] rates of growth," said Maxwell, director of international technology policy at the US Department of Commerce. "But unless there is an environment where people feel safe and secure, these growth rates won't occur."
Calling trusted interactions the most important barrier to electronic commerce growth, he cited a recent Harvard/MIT study that said 58 percent of the people surveyed were more likely to provide information to a Web site that posts its privacy policies.
Though he has so far kept a low public profile, Maxwell is expected to play a key role in coordinating policy positions in areas such as privacy, export controls, domain names, Internet taxes, standards, and digital signatures.
Addressing his reluctance to step into the limelight, Maxwell gave a general disclaimer before his speech: "Anything I say are my own views and shouldn't be attributed to anything beyond that."
But Maxwell did outline some of the fundamental policy areas underlying electronic commerce, both in the United States and abroad.
Maxwell noted that the IT and telecom sectors represent about one-third of the real growth of the US gross domestic product, and that policy decisions significantly affect business performance. As electronic commerce grows, consumer privacy and awareness issues will be foremost among the government's concerns.
Maxwell reaffirmed the government's laissez-faire approach to regulating the Net, as first spelled out in the administration's 1997 electronic commerce framework.
But he also said that when competition heats up across regional and international boundaries, "people will try to protect their own positions to the detriment of electronic commerce, and policy is very important here."
Maxwell is expected to coordinate the activities of government agencies such as the Patent and Trademark Office, the National Telecommunications & Information Administration, the National Institute for Standards in Technology, and the Bureau of Export Administration.
