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By Suzanna Kerridge, 30 March 2000 00:20

NEWS EU legislation could cost the European ecommerce market up to $10bn in lost revenue by 2003, according to Gene DeRose, CEO of Jupiter Communications. Speaking at European Technology Week in Paris, DeRose said the absence of a cohesive set of laws relating to the Internet - and in particular the collection of user information under the EU's Data Protection directive - will put companies' ecommerce ventures under threat. "Customer data is crucial to successful Internet commerce - it's the sweet spot to owning your customer and not just having casual users. But part of ecommerce lies in allaying fears and paranoia in handing over personal details, and there is not enough dialogue between governments and companies as how to regulate it," DeRose said. Nearly 90 per cent of EU sites are less than confident about how to implement the EU Data Protection directive, he claimed. "If the legal issues are not resolved, or if an agreement is not reached between companies and countries, then you could see organisations blocking access to certain sites for fear of prosecution as they don't know if the information they collect is public or private according to the law of the country where the user is based," he added. Mike Pullen, EU lawyer at Dibb Lupton Alsop, said: "The French agreed to the ecommerce directive and only now are realising that it opens the market, and they are getting worried. DeRose has made a very serious point and I am glad that French companies are being urged to talk about it." Data Protection was a particular point of contention, said Pullen. "The French and Germans especially are paranoid about privacy and data protection and have always had the most stringent laws. What this will lead companies to do is store their back office data in more lenient countries rather than risk the laws of their own. This will fragment the market and make it even harder to regulate," he said.