One way to gauge the maturity of a technology is to determine whether you can make more money off it than it takes to run it. By that measure, Web-based
E-commerce has a lot maturing to do.
When it comes to handling real business transactions with real business and legal implications, Internet technology by itself just doesn't hold up very well. Electronic
billing and payment processing is chicken feed in comparison to leases, mortgage approvals, and the other document-intensive transactions that make the wheels of commerce turn--and still require the
shuffling of paper.
It's not as if the technology to make these things happen electronically doesn't exist. The U.S. government's intelligence agencies have had the technology for years. Unfortunately, if
I told you anything more about that technology, the folks just down the road from me at the National Security Agency's Fort Meade headquarters would have to shoot me.
Most of the reason we still have to
handle paper is because of the legality of the signed document. Even with modern imaging technology, an original document still has levels of security that are costly to match electronically. No matter how
many copies of a document are made, it's the relatively easily identified original that carries the weight of law. In order for electronic transactions to carry the same weight as paper transactions, there
has to be an electronic "original" with security controls--like that software the folks at the NSA may or may not use.
Public Key Infrastructure and digital certificates could solve part of the
problem. But how much can you trust a digital certificate? All that's required to register with some certificate authorities is a credit-card number--and credit-card fraud isn't an unknown phenomenon.
Even
if there were a single public key infrastructure and a single digital-signature standard--which there isn't--these would only provide a small piece of the value of a signed document. In the current scheme of
things, with differing PKI implementations, there's no clean way to "cross-certify"--to enable trusted transactions between users of different public key infrastructures.
That's due to change. Document Authentication Systems Inc. (
