As electronic commerce burgeoned in the United States, what was happening across the Atlantic didn’t seem very important. No more. Thanks to the emergence of a single market and to the introduction of the euro—as well as the US demonstration of the power of e-commerce—the European sector of the Internet can now come of age.

Over the past 12 months, European companies have been running fast to exploit the possibilities of the World Wide Web. As a result, any thought that Europe will remain several steps behind the United States may well prove wrong. The very idea of following in the footsteps of the United States was probably inaccurate anyway: for a variety of reasons, e-commerce in Europe was always likely to follow a different course. For one thing, the technological and cultural infrastructures are much more heterogeneous in Europe than they are in the United States. Moreover, European players have had the benefit of hindsight from seeing what has succeeded and failed in the United States. The later entry of European companies into e-commerce also gives them the advantage of applying technology that has advanced considerably over the past two years.

From the broadest business perspective, there is...