ABSTRACT
In this book, we will adopt the definition of the French Association for Commerce and Electronic Interchange,1 a nonprofit industry association created in 1996 to promote ecommerce: electronic commerce is “the set of relations totally dematerialized that economic agents have with respect to each other.” Thus, e-commerce can be equally about physical or virtual goods (software, information, music, books, etc.) or about users’ profiles, because some operators build their business models around the systematic exploitation of demographic and behavioral data collected during online transactions. The transactions can occur on Minitel, the Internet, or through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and the means of payment can be classic or emerging, such as electronic or virtual purses (whether they store legal or token values), electronic or virtual checks, and digital monies. It seems to us that this definition has the advantage of covering the gamut of dematerialized transactions and avoids the drawbacks of an excessive concentration on transactions over the Internet, as many authors have unfortunately done (Cho, 1999; Industry Canada, 1998; McCarthy, 1999; MENTIS, 1998; Lacoste et al., 2000).
