Italian decree gives registered e-mail legal status
The Italian government has passed a decree giving a registered e-mail service the same legal status as recorded delivery letters, a measure expected to go into effect within the next two months, a spokesman for the Innovation and Technologies Ministry said.
The decree, which puts Italy at the digital forefront in Europe, was proposed by Innovation and Technologies Minister Lucio Stanca and approved by the cabinet Thursday.
"The measure is an act of modernity. Electronic-mail is increasingly becoming an instrument of daily communication," Stanca said in a prepared statement.
In 2003, the number of e-mail messages handled by the public administration rose to 31 million from 14.6 million the previous year, the minister said. The cost to the civil service of sending conventional postal mail was estimated at €20 (US$24) per letter, compared to about €2 per e-mail, he said. Replacing traditional telegrams with e-mail correspondence has reduced the Foreign Ministry's paper consumption by more than 17 tons, Stanca said.
Some 20 Italian ISPs (Internet service providers) currently possess the technical qualifications to operate the registered e-mail service, the Council of State and the Privacy Authority spokesman Dario de Marchi said. Customers using the service will receive a message from their provider confirming that the e-mail has been sent and another message from the recipient's provider confirming its arrival, according to an Innovation Ministry statement. Authorized providers of the service will be obliged to keep a record of the message traffic for two years and information from their registry will be accepted as legal proof of a message being sent, even if the customer loses receipts regarding the correspondence, the statement said.
Government guidelines say the e-mail service must be safe from external interference and meet security criteria established by European and international authorities. "The government doesn't say what technology should be used. We just set the general parameters," De Marchi said. "We would be a communist state if we were actually determining the choice of technical protocols."
Italy is also the leading European country in the adoption of digital signatures in online financial transactions and official correspondence over the Internet, De Marchi said. So far, some 1.25 million Italians have registered a digital signature with the 13 companies authorized to issue them, he said. On Monday Stanca presented a 27-year-old Milan businesswoman, Teresa Panarella, with the one millionth smart card containing a digital signature issued by the information technology company of the Italian Chambers of Commerce, Infocamere SpA.
The number of registered signatures in Italy dwarfs that of Sweden with 100,000 and Germany with 25,000, de Marchi said. The use of electronic correspondence backed up by digital signatures is estimated to save Italian businesses more than €260 million a year, the spokesman said. During the course of 2003, digital signature-backed correspondence between Italian companies and chambers of commerce leapt from 8 percent to 80 percent of the total correspondence, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Friday.
In another first for Italy, the company responsible for e-procurement for the public administration announced Tuesday it is accepting digital signature-backed offers on CD-ROM, as well as traditional offer documents on paper, as part of the bidding process for a public tender. The competition is for a contract to supply hardware and software for the staff payments system at the Economics Ministry, the procurement company Consip SpA said.
