Online Consumer Protection: Some Perspectives from Law and Economics

This essay traces the evolution of online consumer protection from the opening of the Internet to commerce in the mid-1990s through to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence, arguing that trust has always been the central problem and that entrepreneurs, driven by competitive pressure and consumer demand, have repeatedly built the solutions.

By Julian Morris[1]

I. Trust and Online Commerce

Until the mid-1990s, there was only a modest need for “online consumer protection” beca