A decade ago, when people were talking about e-commerce, what they were talking about, to a significant extent, were low barriers to entry. The idea was that someone, anyone, a small business person, could suddenly now access a global marketplace. Frankly, what I have heard for the last almost two hours now is that the barriers to entry are even higher than most envisioned they would be. In fact, they may well be higher now than they are in the offline world, which certainly isn't the promise e-commerce provided.
Mrs. Cukier talked about disaggregating things a little bit. I would disaggregate not so much on success and failure but on the different kinds of businesses. There are low barriers to entry in the service sector, where we are not necessarily talking about big equipment or products and the like. We are seeing some movement in that area, although not nearly enough, in part because of the absence of protections. Let's say you are trying to create a platform, and you are now liable for everything everybody says on your platform. That's a significant risk in Canada that doesn't exist in the United States.
There are opportunities both to sell physical products and to engage in some of those services. It is pretty clear that if we have barriers, whether legal risks or business risks or simply barriers-to-entry challenges—and it's clear that we are facing all three—a lot of this promise remains unfulfilled.