It is principally by interposing third parties that solutions are being sought. A clearing house offers consumers anonymity, and enables them to surf on the Internet with their privacy protected. Urged by the government to do so, organizations hand over the key to their cryptosystem to a Trusted Third Party. Note the resemblance with the earlier invented key escrow system, where a software producer deposits the source code of his program with a third party, in order to pacify his client. To elucidate these third party solutions, and explore their implications, a comparison will be made with inter-firm alliances, as these have developed the last two decades.
Firms temporarily ally together to pursue common goals.
Also here, the problem of trust looms large. These last two constructions effectively use the third party as a screen against unwanted spillover of knowledge and information. In the article third party solutions for interfirm alliances on the one hand, and in Cyberspace on the other will be compared. They will be shown to have a lot of similarities. Both kinds of mechanisms will also be integrated into a theoretical framework, along the following lines.