Electronic Commerce
Chapter Nine overviewed e-commerce and the many privacy, security, and legal concerns surrounding it. The Chapter first describes the many types of commerce: business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer, and consumer-to-business. The last of which I did not think was possible, but the book explained that freelancing is an instance of consumer-to-business commerce. The Chapter then goes on to describe the various models of e-commerce, such as products, services, and subscriptions. This Chapter also explained how the rise of e-commerce caused disintermediation and reintermediation in many industries – which I had learned of before thanks to a course in Information Systems I took over the Summer.
This Chapter wraps up with the cultural and legal issues businesses may encounter when dealing in e-commerce internationally, and explains that some e-commerce sites may limit their international sales to specific countries because of this. I have witnessed the complexities of these legal issues myself; an online videogame I play was previously sold worldwide, however the online service portion of the game was only legal in roughly fifty countries. Essentially, due to some e-commerce law shenanigans, you could buy and download the game, but the game publisher wasn’t legally allowed to let you to actually play it if you were in certain countries. After months of illegally allowing those users to play the game, the publisher realized their mistake, but at that point, thousands of people from those restricted countries had purchased and were playing the game. Originally, these people were simply going to have their access to the game revoked, however the resulting uproar from the game’s community led the publisher to somehow “grandfather” in all of the players who had bought the game in those countries before it went off-sale - they never explained the specifics, but whatever they did managed to alleviate the legal barrier for those players’ accounts.