Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
(Statistics Canada
2010
), comprise roughly 11 % of the Canadian GDP and are
growing quickly. The bulk of such activity occurs among businesses rather than
between firms and consumers (i.e., intermediate rather than final demand). The
rising popularity of e-commerce forces firms to change their business models,
giving rise to new products and processes and annihilating older ones in a
ceaseless process of creative destruction. For example, one-half of Canadians use
the internet to make travel reservations. For some observers, e-commerce presents
a danger of mounting cross-border purchases from the United States (McKeowen
and Brocca
2007
). In northern Canada, e-commerce is less well developed.
Nonetheless, telemedicine has gained ground in Nunavut (Heaton
2011
).
In early 2012, U.S. e-commerce retail sales exceeded $224 billion, and were
growing at twice the rate of total retail sales. Despite predictions that ''click and
order'' shopping would eliminate ''brick and mortar'' stores, e-tailing has been
slow to catch on, however, comprising only 4.6 % of total U.S. retail sales,
perhaps because it lacks the emotional content of shopping. e-tailing comprised the
vast majority of travel reservations ($8 billion/year), 62 % of all banking trans-
actions, 17 % of computer sales, and 11 % of book sales. The most successful
example perhaps is Amazon.com, started by Seattle entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, which
now is responsible for 60 % of all topics sold online. Other examples include
online auctions (e.g., eBay) and Internet music (e.g., downloading of MP3 music
files), which has provoked a firestorm of opposition from music companies con-
cerned about infringement of their intellectual property rights and declining over-
the-counter music sales. Indeed, e-books now comprise 10 % of all book sales, and
music downloads exceed purchases of CDs, sending sales of the latter crashing in a
downward spiral of creative destruction. I-tunes alone comprises 10 % of all music
sales. Streaming on-demand downloads of movies, through companies such as
Netflix, have increased their share as well. However, internet sales have also
provoked worries about tax evasion and sales of illegal goods (e.g., pharmaceu-
ticals from abroad). Internet-based sales of stocks (e.g., E*Trade) now comprise
15 % of all U.S. trades. B2B e-commerce has spread from its earlier confines in
large corporations to include increasing numbers of small and medium-sized
enterprises (Grandon and Pearson
2004
), a process that allegedly ''levels the
playing field'' and obviates the advantages of size. E-advertising comprises only
1 % of total revenues in the United States and is overwhelmingly focused on
computer and software firms. Indeed, many users are now wary of ''spam'' e-mail
(unwanted commercial messages), which constitute an ever-larger, and increas-
ingly annoying, share of e-mail traffic (by some estimates as high as 75 %).
Although the U.S. comprises one vast national market with relatively few
internal cultural and political barriers, unlike Europe, e-commerce is nonetheless
unevenly distributed among its cities and regions (Zook
2000
,
2001
,
2002
). Zook
(
2005
) offers a detailed portrait of the regional internet economy of the San
Francisco Bay Area, a churning hub of dot.com entrepreneurship in the 1990s and
2000s, with companies such as Yahoo!, Google, America Online, Ebay, and
Mosaic (which later gave birth to Netscape and Hotmail). Such an analysis goes
far to debunk the myth of the ''spaceless'' internet economy, and points instead to
