Conflict stifles

THE GROWTH of electronic commerce at the international level is being held back by conflicting server, payment and security technologies and protocols, says University of Hamburg’s Winfried Lamersdorf.

Professor Lamers-dorf, a speaker at World E-Com 1999, said user communities were experiencing difficulties due to the development of partial e-commerce solutions and a lack of integrated environments.

He is lobbying for agreements to be established as both ‘official’ and ‘de facto’ standards.

“While most of the technical challenges are being addressed, worldwide integration of systems necessary to achieve a seamless, global e-commerce infrastructure will be difficult to achieve without international agreement,” Professor Lamersdorf said.

He said global integration conflicted with the interests of supply end corpor-ations that had committed to research and development to bring their own e-commerce products and protocols to the market.