Conflicting agendas cloud accord on internet trading By John Davidson http://www.afr.com.au/content/971110/inform/inform3.html Banks will lose their shirts; retailers will go bust if the import tax threshold isn't lowered; retailers will go bust if the threshold isn't raised; individuals will be monitored by a person or persons unknown; the Tax Office will kill it first, or maybe it won't. These are just some of the often strange and always contradictory claims heard by the Joint Parliamentary Committee of Public Accounts during the Sydney leg of its inquiry into internet commerce last week. [...] One expert witness, who said he had been involved in the establishment of the internet more than 20 years ago, testified that internet commerce should be banned because the speed and security of the network had barely improved in the last decade. Modem speeds, said Richard Marschall from Marschall Acoustics, were still limited to 9600bps (contrary to the claims of ISPs and modem makers, which offer speeds of around 50kbps) and using the internet was still grossly inefficient compared to putting a disk in the post. Worse, 90 per cent of all internet bandwidth was used to (slowly, one presumes) download pornography. Claims that the internet could be used for serious business were also grossly inflated, he said. Dr Marschall said that any banks that chose to use the internet for commerce would "lose their shirts" because the security of the internet was so poor. The cryptography relied on by banks to scramble data on the public network could readily be cracked, he said, because law enforcement agencies refused to let people use strong versions of the software for fear of it falling into the hands of criminals. (Those Australian banks that offer Web banking sites do, in fact, use a strong form of cryptography known as IDEA, which is thought to be effectively uncrackable.) "The internet (is) an ideal media (sic) for fraud and other unethical practices," he said in his submission. "It is not clear if there is any fix for these problems -- short of pulling the plug and banning internet commerce. Commercial transactions were banned for the first 15 years of the internet's existence for precisely these reasons."