E-commerce-related activities are now being regulated more specifically by Spanish legislation.

Therefore, in transactions involving e-commerce, regard should be had to legislation on distance sales, advertising, standard contract terms, electronic signatures, data protection, intellectual and industrial property, and ecommerce and information society services. Apart from these specific laws, it is also necessary to look to the general legislation on civil and commercial contracts.

In any event, the Spanish legislature is currently making resolute headway in regulating transactions of this nature. Examples of its aim to legislate on matters relating to new information technologies include the e-commerce and Information Society Services Law, and, more recently, Electronic Signature Law 59/2003.

A fundamental point to bear in mind when undertaking any initiative in the area of electronic transactions: the applicable legislation varies depending on the potential recipient of the related offer. Consequently, there is greater leeway for the parties to agree if the transaction takes place between companies (business to business, B2B) than if the commercial dealings are between a company and a private consumer as the final recipient (business to consumer, B2C), since, among others, consumer protection legislation will apply in the latter case.

e-commerce raises tax issues that can be addressed with difficulty from a purely Spanish perspective. Perhaps for that reason, unlike other occasions, the Spanish tax authorities have not seen fit to adopt unilateral measures, preferring to wait until a consensus is reached on the measures to be adopted regionally and even worldwide. As will be explained below, the process of reaching a consensus on the VAT treatment of "online e-commerce" is fairly advanced, as is shown by the recent approval of the EU Directive on e-commerce and its consequent transposition into Spanish law from July 1, 2003 onwards.

As for the direct taxation issues (the existence of permanent establishments, the legal characterization of income, the transfer pricing problem and the application of the "place-of-effective-management" rule) it is foreseeable that consensus will take the form of a coordinated, more uniform interpretation of the various criteria determining the tax treatment of e-commerce, rather than a legislative change.As will be explained later, an example of this greater coordination is the amendment made to the commentaries on the OECD Model Convention.