OECD Ministerial Conference to Update Policies for Internet Economy
New Internet capabilities and services are at the heart of preparations for a 2008 OECD ministerial conference in Seoul, South Korea. It aims to update policy tools to meet new challenges in the Internet economy and to deal with convergence and the regulatory environment. Private organizations are mobilizing to influence the agenda.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The last ministerial conference was on electronic commerce in 1998, said Sam Paltridge, an official with the OECD Directorate of Science, Technology and Industry. “Many things agreed at that meeting helped create an international framework for developing e-commerce,” such as how to treat taxation across borders, he said. Telecom and economics ministers heard about the great new opportunity of e-commerce, said an industry official who’s not authorized to speak to the press. U.S. government and business were adamant about preventing regulation and taxes, and the 1998 conference influenced national policies, he said.
“Today we're at a similar inflection point,” the industry official said. The common theme is the impact of moving from the PC to a network of servers and storage systems that might be scattered across the globe, he said: “That requires new approaches to regulation… and a serious look at the regulation we have.”
Deregulation may be necessary to prevent barriers to new services such as Google apps, Amazon’s elastic cloud computing, or virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, the industry official said: “Seoul could be an opportunity to better explain how different the world is [now] and why less regulation would probably be more effective.”
The U.S. really wants to see results but was the last to get behind holding a ministerial conference, the industry official said. Agreement to hold the meeting acknowledges that a new set of problems has emerged concerning the modern Internet, the web and the online economy, said Richard Simpson of Industry Canada, speaking as chairman of the OECD’s Committee on Information, Computer and Communications Policy. The conference and preparations for it aim to take up some of the challenges that have emerged for governments, business and consumer groups, and others, Simpson said, “and to update the kinds of policy tools that were put in place in 1998 to meet the challenges.”
Convergence, confidence and creativity are themes for the ministerial conference June 17 and 18, Paltridge said. Convergence involves telecom, broadcasting, voice, video and data, and “how this affects traditional approaches to communication regulation,” he said. Meeting government policy objectives in areas such as universal service, broadband development and its implications for areas such as the environment, health and education will be a focus, Paltridge said. “Confidence” refers to security, privacy, identity management, he said. “Creativity” concerns innovation, digital content, e-science, productivity, growth, he said.
Converging points of view may feed back into national legislatures or into international organizations such as the World Trade Organization or the ITU, officials said. Discussions on telecom market liberalization for example, had gone on in the OECD about a decade before the WTO reached agreement to liberalize telecom markets, Paltridge said.
Preparation for the ministerial conference includes an open meeting Oct. 3 called “The Participative Web: Strategies and Policies for the Future” in Ottawa, Canada. Negotiations during closed ICCP meetings Oct. 4 and 5 and in March 2008 will be over high-level principles for guiding development of the Internet economy, Paltridge said. Government and business representatives will meet to continue negotiating the ministerial declaration and background documents, Paltridge said. Observer countries to the ICCP include India, Estonia, Singapore, Russia, South Africa and others. Ministers from China and India are also expected to attend the ministerial conference.
Private organizations can comment on the ministerial conference through an OECD online public consultation that ends Sept. 14, said Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project. The Association for Progressive Communications, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Internet Governance Project and others are mobilizing to increase their say in shaping the ministerial agenda, Mueller said. They have organized a meeting June 16, 2008, in Seoul and plan to attend the forum on the participative Web, Mueller added.