Promote Trust in e-commerce
GTA is a membership organization - driven by the active participation of organizations world-wide that are working with business and consumer constituencies in each of their countries to promote trust in e-commerce. GTA's objectives fully implement the recommendations made by the Global Business Dialogue for Electronic Commerce (GBDe) for harmonization of high e-commerce standards, cooperative and accessible cross border dispute resolution, and cooperation amongst trustmark programs. www.gbde.org/recommendations/miami00.pdf

Governance
A GTA Organizing Committee has been established, including representatives from organizations in Asia, Europe and the Americas. The Organizing Committee will work over the next months to create the format and structure for the GTA.

Key Goals

• Meet Security, Privacy, Merchant Reliability & Dispute Resolution Concerns
  Surveys show that consumer concerns over security, privacy, merchant reliability and adequate redress mechanisms (such as ADRs) remain strong, and can threaten the predicted growth rate for e-commerce, especially cross border e-commerce and B2C e-commerce. These concerns are especially crucial in developing economies, where the Internet offers promise to SMEs because of lower capital investments needed for direct marketing but where trust and confidence in performance, within and across borders, is not high.

• Avoid Imposition of Disparate Laws and Regulations
  At the same time, businesses rightfully fear that governments, responding to consumer and media pressures about consumer protection concerns, will create a proliferation of disparate regulations that will present formidable barriers to e-commerce, especially for small and medium size businesses for whom the Internet offers so much promise. The overarching choice of law, jurisdiction and remedial issues will not be solved by government-to-government harmonization negotiations in any reasonable time frame.

• Set High Self Regulatory Business Practice Standards
  This environment presents a unique opportunity for business self-regulatory organizations to lead the way in building trust and confidence and in implementing a high, but harmonized, set of business practice standards, without excessive government intervention. GTA will deliver on both needs, building on the trustmark concept pioneered by the Better Business Bureau, replicated by non-profit groups world-wide, and endorsed by GBDe and other business organizations and by many government agencies throughout the world.

The Global Trustmark Alliance will meet these needs by implementation of short term and long term goals.

Over the next year or so, GTA expects to:

• promote best practices by trustmark organizations throughout the world;
• establish cooperative systems for redressing cross border complaints; and
• begin consideration of how to achieve greater harmony in the online business codes used by trustmark organizatioins.

In the longer term, GTA expects to:

• Implement a (non-governmental) online business practice code that will be a "floor" under local trustmark codes utilized in participating jurisdictions;
• implement out-of-court dispute settlement mechanisms with compatible procedures and internet-based technologies that will facilitate the handling of cross border complaints;
• allow participating businesses to display an international trustmark that, when co-branded with locally recognized trustmarks, will inform consumers that participating companies meet high quality global e-commerce standards and are prepared to resolve customer complaints from wherever they originate; and
• assist business and consumer organizations initiate new trustmark programs to serve their local e-commerce needs and help them eventually join the GTA.