On Fri, 23 Jun 2000, William Allen Simpson wrote:
< . . . . >
> Surprise! Many consumers comparison shop on-line, but quit before
> purchasing, making their final purchase at a later time in a
> conventional manner. Vendors are now permitted another new fee for
> "withdrawal of consent".
>
> According to Congressional staff, this new fee may not have been
> intended to be charged until after a consummated transaction. Such a
> limitation is not explicitly stated in the legislation. It is hard to
> imagine that a court would enforce the new fee without an actual
> purchase of a product.
>
> However, according to the same staff, this specific language was vetted
> with Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, MicroSoft, and other vendors. No
> consumer advocates were mentioned.
A reporter for CNet wrote a story on this bill before it passed and
the story focused on 'digital signatures'. I wrote the reporter and
pointed out that the bill dealt only with 'electronic signatures' which
have nothing to do with cryptography. This is the response I got back
from the reporter:
|| I contacted the House as soon as I got your email, and after some
|| probing-it took a couple of hours to get someone "informed" on the
|| phone-determined that I had been misinformed. The House people had
|| talked extensively about digital signatures, when the bill is in fact
|| about electronic signatures, as you said. That the people I spoke with
|| did not initially know the difference in this important legislation is
|| a bit disconcerting.
This is a pretty sad state of affairs. We don't really expect the elected
members of Congress to know very much, but it is alarming to find out the
staff can't (or won't) do a decent job, either.
