NEWSLETTER-2017

247 LAW OF OBLIGATIONS Electronic Contracting in Turkey* Att. Sezi Demircark Introduction Electronic Commerce (“E-commerce”) in Turkey is expanding rapidly corollary to the rapid growth of technology and use of the internet. According to the statics of the Information and Communica- tion Technologies Authority ( Bilgi Teknolojileri ve İletişim Kurumu ), internet usage rose to 62.2 million in 2016, i.e. a 179 % increase in five years. Another statistic shows that E-commerce is worth approxi- mately 8 billion Euros in 2016. 1 . Such approach has raised significant neccessity technical and legal regulations, as the contracting of the worldwide web raises questions about security, legal validity, compli- ance, data protection, etc. In such neccessity, current Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce (“E-Commerce Law”) that was adopted to address such questions with an aim to harmonize with the European Union legislations 2 . This article discusses electronic contracting under the current E- Commerce Law, together with the draft regulations of the E-Commerce Law. Commercial Communication and Procedural Information Contracting by electronic means presents the difficulty to identify the other party of a contract, as well as raises questions concerning legal effectivenes and validity. Hence the E-Commerce Law mainly focused on the information requirements of the service providers 3 as a * Article of July 2017 1 https://ecommercenews.eu/ecommerce-turkey-worth-7-95-billion-euros-2016/. 2 Directive 2000/31/EC of June 8, 2000, on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the Internal. 3 According to the E-Commerce Law the Service Provider defined as a natural or