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The Emperor's New Clothes: The Shocking Truth About Digital Signatures And Internet Commerce, Jane K. Winn

Articles

This Article critiques a specific set of assumptions about specific application of digital signature technology: that contracts will be formed over the Internet among parties with no prior relationships through reliance on digital signature certificates issued by trusted third parties to establish the identity of the parties. This application for digital signature technology was once seen as both its most ambitious and most promising application because, for parties with no prior knowledge of each other, there is not yet a reliable system of online identities in Internet commerce.

Parties with an ongoing commercial relationship can absorb the cost of offline …