Are Current B2b Security Standards Antithetical To Global Interoperability?

This paper argues that powerful impetus exists for the realisation of a global multilateral electronic market infrastructure, as envisaged by the ebXML endeavour. Crucial in this regard is the problem of interoperability: making it possible for disparate systems to interact fluently. An obvious panacea would be to use a pre-specified set of protocols comprised of selected globally-accessible open standards. However, the status quo B2B-interaction implementations comprise protocol-neutral technologies and standards that propagate unwieldy permutations of possible trading partner configurations, which, ultimately, are antithetical to the creation of a global electronic marketplace. Allowing diversity in the choice of protocols is a limiting factor in crossintegration. It facilitates the relatively smaller numbers of participants to negotiate common terms of agreement for bivalent relationships, but each participant might have to configure a different protocol profile for each trading partner it intends to interact with. Thus, interoperability in the wider global multilateral marketplace context would be stultified, since isolated pockets of discrete relationships are proliferating on an ad-hoc basis. Unless a global initiative in which a set of open standards is unequivocally specified as a single standard for global interoperability, an ebXML-like marketplace will remain a pipedream. It is clear that Web services provide the most promising means of achieving global interoperability. Yet, within the context of a global multilateral electronic marketplace, unless specific directives are forthcoming at the highest level, standards such as WS-Security remain protocol-neutral and continue to support an opposing momentum.