The 49th Parallel. The world’s longest undefended border. Call it what you want, you should probably go take a look at it soon — before it disappears in a flash of technology. The signs are already here.

Take the Internet, for example. It’s doing more than NAFTA to erase the concept of national boundaries. Roughly speaking, Web sites can be located anywhere in the world. Sometimes you can guess where they are, like www.ucalgary.ca or www.whitehouse.gov. (But type carefully, www.whitehouse.com will take you to a notorious porn site). But where is the online toyshop of www.etoys.com? And do we really care? Sort of, as I found out recently. I was looking for that special gift for my son Jordan’s 13th birthday.

I decided on a radio-controlled model airplane that carries a disposable camera. Sort of a junior U2 spy plane, and probably one of the coolest gadgets for a kid his age. (Hey, Dad can play with it too!) I tried the local hobby shops and they didn’t have it. I made a bunch of phone calls in a major American city, to no avail.

Then I found the thing (a Cox Recon model) on the eToys Web site. Bad news, it’s out of stock. Good news, they’ll send me an e-mail when it comes in.

Bottom line, a week later I get the e-mail, and a few days later this big box is sitting on the doorstep in Calgary. Oh yes, I paid extra shipping charges to get it from the U.S., but with the ‘$15 off’ eToys coupon I found on the Internet, I basically got it shipped for free.

Now, I will admit I’m a bit of a technogeek, so I actually enjoyed going through the process of placing this order, finding a coupon, seeing how they take my credit card, etc. It was done on a “secure server” and I’ve become pretty comfortable using my card online with stores that I trust.

I do keep a special credit card for online purchases, and I watch it like a hawk for extra charges. The main danger is not really typing your card number on the Internet, it’s who gets it at the other end and what they do with it. So if you’ve just met a company on the Internet, and you’ve never heard of them “in real life,” you might want to consider payment alternatives like sending a cheque or the emerging “Cheque” technologies. American Express is also starting to provide one-time use credit card numbers to minimize your risk.

Of course, one risk you can’t control is the possibility that the company will collapse before it fills your order. Even a stalwart like eToys was mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal article on “Vulture Capitalists” as needing to go out for an urgent injection of capital to stay afloat.

Apparently, my pleasant crossborder eShopping experience was not exactly typical. Surveys show a significant percentage of online orders are filled incompletely, billed incorrectly, or just never processed at all. Being in a different country from the website’s owner can make things uglier.

According to Pierre Schuurmans, CEO of a new Canadian company called Borderfree, “50 per cent of all US websites don’t ship to Canada. “For those that do,” he says, “they place the responsibility for duties, taxes and brokerage fees on the consumer. You don’t know what the exchange rate is, so you really don’t know what you’ll end up paying.”

Of course, he would say that because his whole business is based on helping Canadian consumers shop at U.S. websites, for a fee. He also claims that Amazom.com won’t ship 80 per cent of their selection to Canada. “They only ship books and CDs. We can help you get a hold of everything else in their catalog.” Currently, they only do retail sites, but he says they’re “working on auction sites like eBay.”

In case your mind is wandering down a nasty street now, they’ll only handle things that are legal to import into Canada and, he says, “we’re pretty conservative.”

Using Borderfree, or the competitors that are sure to surface, does have its advantages. Going back to my model airplane example, things could have been a lot nastier if, say, the thing arrived smashed into more pieces than it’s supposed to have. At the very least, I would have had some interesting conversations with the phone jockeys at 1-800-GOETOYS.

Had I dealt with Borderfree, Schuurmans assures me, things would be simple. “If you decide to return it,” he purrs, “you would just send it to our customs broker partner in Windsor, and we handle the reverse logistics of returning it and getting all the duties and taxes back from the government.”

He adds that they simply follow the return policy of the manufacturer, so you are basically being treated like a U.S. customer.

Will the day come when we don’t even think about the Canada-U.S. border? Pilots and other frequent travellers have already been issued special cards that allow them to cross without standing in queues, on a kind of honor system. Consider this: In secret labs on both sides of the line, researchers are working on the next generation of border control technology.

You’ll still have a passport, but it will almost certainly be a device that can be read electronically from a distance. One insider tells me it will work like this. As you approach the border checkpoint, a camera will zoom in on your head from five metres away As you get one metre away, it will have found your eye and started to read the unique pattern of your iris.

If it matches the passport you’re carrying, you’ll just keep walking. If not — well the long arm of the law will still be waiting to defend what’s left of the True North Strong and Free!

Web Watch:
www.etoys.com
www.borderfree.com
www.whitehouse.gov