Foremost global e-commerce business group to hold meeting in Manila

The Global Business Dialogue on Electronic Commerce (GBDe) – the world’s foremost private sector e-commerce organization – is meeting in Manila on March 19 and 20 to map out its 2002 recommendations to international leaders.

Ambassador Roberto Romulo, chairman of Equitable Card Network – which is hosting the meeting – announced that the GBDe is seeking to boost the widespread deployment and usage of the Internet and electronic commerce to enable all citizens and businesses to reap the benefits of the Information Society. Equitable Card is the only GBDe member from ASEAN. Romulo is a member of the GBDe Business Steering Committee and was the former chair of the Digital Working Group.

The GBDe – comprising CEOs and board-level representatives of leading companies from throughout the world – is developing policy and encouraging governments and other stakeholders to accept its existing recommendations concerning nine critical e-commerce issues, including consumer confidence, convergence, cyber security, digital bridges, e-government, intellectual property rights, taxation and trade.

The need for business to contribute meaningful solutions to bridge the digital divide continues to be an area of importance to the GBDe. The Digital Bridges Working Group is focusing on the role which business can play in this process and has advocated a market-led economic climate which should favor those in emerging economies.

As part of the GBDe meeting, a special session on e-ASEAN and GBDe cooperation has been organized to foster dialogue between GBDe members and e-ASEAN on joint action to address the digital divide. Ira Magaziner, former chief advisor of President Bill Clinton on the Internet and Julianne Lee, convenor of the World Economic Forum’s Digital Divide Task Force will also be participating in this session.

One of the signature events at the GBDe annual conference in Miami in September 2000 was the signing of a statement of cooperation between the GBDe and the eASEAN task force. The task force, chaired by Romulo, was mandated by ASEAN leaders to draw up recommendations on how to facilitate ICT and e-commerce development in the region. The cooperation agreement calls for the GBDe to provide, at the request of the task force, their expertise in support of policy framework development for e-commerce by ASEAN governments and to serve as a clearinghouse for digital divide projects. Subsequently, the ASEAN countries signed a framework agreement on e-commerce development in the region. It provided for concerted action to develop regional network infrastructure, create the necessary policy and legal environment for secure e-commerce, and liberalize trade and investment restrictions on e-commerce related goods and services.

Currently, GBDe members are working with eASEAN on consumer confidence, cross-border certification, convergence, e-commerce readiness assessment, e-government, cyber security and distance learning.

During 2002, the GBDe is planning to develop a "broadband initiative." The GBDe believes broadband deployment is key to the growth of the e-commerce. The broadband initiative seeks to advocate best practices to deploy broadband technologies both in areas in which the deployment has hardly started and in countries in which the pace of deployment is low.

Also during 2002 the consumer confidence working group – now incorporating internet payments and cyber ethics as well as personal data protection, ADR and trustmarks — is promoting GBDe consumer confidence solutions. The GBDe believes it has an opportunity to assist in the development of practicable solutions for increasing consumer trust in the global electronic marketplace.