Business

Contestants are you ready?

Despite voluble lobbying from the Internet industry and the media, the controversial ECT Bill became law last month.

01 September 2002

There`s a new law in town, and a whole new posse of sheriffs to police it. If you run a web site, the Department of Communications` squad of cyber inspectors could knock on your door any day, and demand to do a complete audit of your systems. And they`d probably not be satisfied.

The meat of what now stands as the Electronic Communication and Transaction (ECT) Act, which – all other things being equal – deems electronic signatures and contracts to be equivalent to their paper counterparts, is a good and necessary addition to our statutes. It would be churlish to suggest otherwise.

But other parts of the Act are downright silly, technically inadequate, or more than a little worrying in the extent to which they place power over private sector matters into the hands of a single Minister. This publication has railed against these provisions to no avail.

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