International contracts and e-commerce: conceptual framework
In the previous articles, some features of international contracts have been presented, according to a classic and general paper-based approach in international trade. Actually, in the current global economic governance panorama, the rise of the electronic commerce has developed new and particular issues from a legal point view, based on the particular nature of the mean used for contracting: the internet.
The birth of the internet has changed the face of the world in many different ways, by sharing information, cultures, opinions, personal data. Legally speaking, the problem with the internet is that it is not an entity that can be subject to a regulation, as it could be other human phenomenons, because it is not a physical entity first, and second, it is not characterized by a territory. Therefore, for international law, if it is sometimes already difficult to establish – and make acceptable for the States of the international community – rules concerning “physical phenomenons”, regulating the internet is simply the challenge of 21st century.
Certainly, in the field of trade, the internet has eliminated many costs of transaction in contractual relationships “buyer/seller”, by increasing the turnover in the sector: last statistics tell us that just the Business to Business e-commerce will reach globally 6.7 Trillion USD by 2020 (source: Frost & Sullivan Research). This estimated growth and these numbers are more interesting for us, as Europeans, if we just think that currently one of the most important companies in the world in the field of the e-commerce (if not the first) is the Chinese Alibaba Group, which in 2012, through just two portals, handled 1.1 trillion yuan ($170 billion) in sales, more than eBay and Amazon combined (source: The economist). It is not wrong to admit that the future of the internet trade will be in the eastern part of the world.
The task of international trade law is to study and provide rules in order to give that certainty always demanded by international economic operators and entrepreneurs for commercial exchanges. In this regard, United Nations, through its "commission for the international trade law" (UNCITRAL), since its birth, has always worked in this sense, by developing many instruments in the form of conventional texts, or model laws. The most important text in the field of international trade, developed by this commission, and currently the most used in the world by privates, is the Convention of Vienna or CISG (Convention for the international sale of goods).
The CISG was established in order to regulate international sale contracts Business to Business but, more importantly, it was developed in a time in which Facebook, Whatsapp or other kinds of electronic communication through the internet were absolutely unthinkable. So, the problem is to understand how it is possible to apply this specific kind of instrument ( used for traditional paper-based contracts ) to electronic contracts and how the interpreter needs to act in those cases.
According to the fact that, firstly, the law needs – as its main goal – to follow all the changes in human society everyday and try to answer with new regulatory solutions and, secondly, that the internet is surely a phenomenon always in fast evolution, every single norm or every single research about legal and economic interactions with this mean, might be already obsolete in the eyes of the reader.