CTIA Rejects RosettaNet, Citing Privacy Concerns >BY Rachel Chalmers.

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CTIA) has thrown the future of the RosettaNet supply chain integration project into question. Last Friday, the CTIA rejected a proposed version of the RosettaNet standard on the grounds that it favored American companies at the expense of European players. The pivotal issue is privacy. The CTIA says RosettaNet would make it easier for businesses to exchange their customers' personal data. This is more or less standard practice in the USA, but the European Union has much more stringent laws to protect individual privacy.

RosettaNet was devised as a way of using the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s extensible markup language (XML) to link suppliers and distributors over the internet. In April 1999, it chalked up its first Partner Interface Process (PIP). By June, it was on track to go live on February 2, 2000. The CTIA's rejection of the proposed standard throws a significant spanner in the works. Whether the project's backers - which include among their number Baan, Novell and the National Institute of Standards and Technology - can retrofit the technology to make it acceptable to European legislators ahead of the February deadline remains to be seen.