Customs and Border Protection Focusing on Oversight of Online Marketplaces

Customs and Border Protection is focused on deploying new technologies and catching up with the massive growth in e-commerce as it moves toward the end of the decade, Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said at a CBP event in Atlanta. Beyond helping confront the “seismic shift” in the supply chain over the past several years, new technologies -- like RF identification and facial recognition -- will soon smooth trade across land borders, McAleenan said Tuesday. The growth in e-commerce “looks more like a rocket taking off than a plane,” he said. Small parcel shipments doubled 2016-17, and the agency doesn’t see the trend abating. CBP needs new legal and regulatory authority and partnerships so it can oversee new parties in the supply chain -- e-marketplaces like Amazon and warehousing operations for third-party sellers -- plus existing entities it has never regulated. Blockchain “may also be part of the answer,” giving CBP the ability to determine product origin and whether the product came from a trusted supplier, supply chain and e-marketplace, McAleenan said. Companies are looking at the technology from the perspective of “their ecosystem for their business model,” so one may use blockchain to ensure its provenance from the beginning of the supply chain while another may use it to add data that can ride along the blockchain and share more information about a shipment.