Ottawa, ON

--- Upon commencing on Wednesday, October 3, 2007 at 5:02 p.m.

MR. OXLEY: What we saved is one of the best sessions for last. And again this is the participative web. As just by the last conversation in the Sussex Room over there, we’ve had some great participation.

So if everybody would work their way in here and the panellists for the last session work their way up here.

And I’ve got to say the feedback that I’m getting from everybody has been absolutely wonderful. The conversations have been happening in the coffee room –- it’s why we can’t get the people back in here -- are great. The panellists are spawning some wonderful ideas.

And I can’t wait to see what ideas and possibilities come out of here. Like Suzanne said earlier today, it is about all the possibility that’s there.

All right. So, without further ado and to give them all the time that they can because they’ve got some wonderful topic, so, “Opportunities and Challenges For Policy”.

And I’d like to introduce Michael Geist the Canadian Research Chair of Internet and e-Commerce Law to lead us and chair us through this conversation.

Michael.

MR. GEIST: Well thanks very much. It’s late in the afternoon but I think we have a panel that will keep everybody’s interest on our way to the reception later on.

Let me start by introducing -- I’m going to actually just upfront just introduce the panellists. But I’ve been asked to provide a bit of a summary of the day which is impossible, not just because of course there were parallel sessions and you can’t be really in two places at once, but because frankly it’s been such a full day that I think to try to provide a brief summary in just a couple of minutes won’t do it justice.

But I do want to at least put a couple of issues on the table. The last panel that we have is really charged with trying to answer some of the questions that were posed at the very beginning of the day and that is to take so much of what’s happening on the participative web and put it into a policy context.

And so we’re really fortunate to get a diversity of views who are going to help us try to do that by providing some of that policy context.

We’ve got, leading off, and we’re going to go, I’m going to ask each of the panellists to go in order, Sangwon Ko, who is Vice Chair of the OECD Working Party on the Information Economy with the Korea Information Society Development Institute; Mark Rotenberg who is the Executive Director of EPIC; Joe Alhadeff, many of you know is with Oracle; Daniela Battisti, who is the Vice Chair of the OECD Infromation, Computer and Communications Policies Committee; Keith Besgrove who is Chair of the OECD Wokring Party on Information Security and Privacy as well as with the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts in Australia; and finally Neil Anderson who is the Head of Telecom with Union Network International and part of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD.

Now I have to say as we came into today it struck me that almost two years ago in January, 2006, the OECD held its Digital Content Conference in Rome. And I know that there are many people in the room who were at that conference.

And I have to say that I found that conference to be truly a turning point in much of the discussion around the participative web even though I can’t recall anybody ever talking about the participative web. But there was certainly a lot of talk about user generated content, user created content. And I think it really marked the first time in a truly international policy fora, that the issue was put on the agenda.

In many respects when you went to many of these international meetings the focus was much more on some of the things we were accustomed to from the 90’s, digital rights management and stronger enforcement tools and the like. And this really started to shift the dialogue.

Though there was no reference to YouTube or Facebook, Club Penguin, no even Web 2.0 or any of those sorts of references, that issue was I think very much in the air. There was I think a true recognition even at that point in time that something exciting, something important was happening.

And I think it’s fair to say is sitting through the various panels and plenaries today that it’s very clear that indeed what we saw taking place almost two years ago has continued to blossom in really remarkable ways today.

The panels in answering the question about what next for the participative web, clearly demonstrated that we’re seeing some pretty profound economic shifts; a number of panels focusing on the way in which corporations are using some of these technologies in very innovative ways; the way that individual citizens and consumers can use these in some very innovative ways and how new companies are being created using these very tools, the Yochai Benkler type of issues.

We also, I think, just as importantly, focused a lot on the societal shifts that we’re seeing. There’s a tendency to read about many of these issues on the business page and focus on who is buying whom and where the dollars are and less on the kinds of things we saw in a number of panels that showed the degree to which these kinds of technologies can have a deep impact on education and on citizen empowerment and on development more generally. And I think that’s terrifically important.

We also saw discussion about how the network itself continues to evolve and that there are going to be network shifts as well.

Now, we were asked at the very beginning of the day to think about this in the context of the policy issues and the role that national governments can play as well as the role that the OECD and international organizations can play. And it seemed to me and I’m hoping that our panellists will address some of these issues, it seems to me that there were a number of issues for which we could identify a clear role for government and for the OECD and around which there is at least some emerging consensus, in many instances quite a lot of emerging consensus.

I place access under this umbrella, access in a number of different guises: access of course to high speed networks, to broadband or access to wireless networks depending on the community, affordable access in many instances; access to research and access to education, the research output, things like open access for federally funded research, government funded research; access to public documentation, the documents that the government itself has now have easy vehicle to ensure that there is broader access to communities; and access to knowledge, the digitization programs that we’re seeing receive an increased amount of attention. This clearly is a policy issue that I think there is a role to play.

So too for privacy and trust. Many of us have just come from the Facebook panel, one in which there was a lot of discussion about the role of Facebook and MySpace and social networks. And it seems to me that it was fairly clear that throughout the day there was a growing recognition that notwithstanding the emphasis on privacy and trust now for several decades, it continues to be a core issue in many of the things that we’re facing, whether that’s privacy concerns, security concerns, emerging concerns, Spam, which isn’t really emerging anymore but Malware, Spyware, those sorts of newer issues continue to be an area where there is a role for governments and groups like the OECD.

So too a role on standard setting, recognition that in this global environment we need global organizations, international organizations to help guide us on some of the standard settings.

There were also, and with this I’ll stop, there were also a number of issues that we might describe as the elephants in the room, the issues that I think many recognized are issues, issues that I think in order for the OECD certainly in terms of its work here, in terms of the ministerial conference next year, has to address in order to ensure that it’s relevant. But issues for around which at least for the moment there is not a clear consensus, indeed issues that can be highly contentious. Yet I think it’s fair to say that the OECD can provide an important forum to try to help address those issues.

Those would of course include intellectual property related concerns. An issue that was often raised but never really dealt with in any significant detail, a recognition that it raises all sorts of thorny question: questions around safe harbours and liability for intermediaries that was raised by Amazon but others as well, in effect, how do we apportion liability and responsibility as part of a participative web when there are so many participating?

Network neutrality related concerns which also came up on a number of occasions, the OECD has already started exploring some of those concerns, issues that we certainly aren't going to solve today, but one in which we need some international fora to help guide us.

Also, I think very interestingly, the way in which government engages with the new engaged participative citizen. How can government, recognizing that today users and citizens are using these tools in ever more ways and are engaged in many of these issues in very important ways, ensure that policy processes ensures that consultations and the like can keep pace. There were some that really wonder whether or not government is in a position to do that.

So there are clearly some really interesting challenges at a minimum and some policy issues to be addressed.

With that, I would like to hand it over to the panel. Nobody is presenting with PowerPoint slides. I have asked each to keep their remarks to about three to four minutes so that we can truly end with a panel that is participative and engaging.

Let me start with Mr. Ko.

MR. KO: Thank you, sir.

The participative Web is really important for Korea in the sense that the incumbent Korean government is called as participatory government because the sitting President in Korea is said to have been elected with a huge popularity among Internet users. So the current Korean government is the outcome of participation through Internet.

Since I'm from the government sector I would like to focus my discussion on government law.

To fully exploit participative Web problems the government is implementing industrial policy, implementation policy and regulatory policy.

For industrial policy we encourage R&D, innovation in content and content‑related network, software and hardware. Also we promote human resource development and promote venture capital industry for detailed content. Those are major tools for industrial policy.

The implementation policy is about building the infrastructure. I think building the infrastructure is sort of key to this participative Web. And things like net neutrality problem comes from the fact that the growth of content is much higher than the growth of the infrastructure itself. When you have growth of infrastructure that exceeds the growth of content, then you don't have natural neutrality problem.

Lastly, we have witnessed the negative side effect of participative Web such as privacy infringement, copyright infringement and obscene UCC posting and we have to deal with that properly.

Norwegian delegate from the floor raised the issue of anonymity of the UCC posting. Some countries like Korea launched a law regarding limited real name system. So you can post things on UCC only when you identify your real names.

I guess that's what I would like to talk about.

Thank you.

MR. ROTENBERG: Thank you, Michael, and thank you to the OECD for the opportunity to participate in this discussion on the participative Web

I wanted to mention that a number of civil society groups are here and we met earlier today. Those groups include the Internet governance projects at Syracuse University, the Association for Progressive Communications, Consumer Project on Technology, Public Knowledge here in Canada, CIPPIC, PIAC and others as well.

We are very enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with the OECD on the upcoming ministerial and also to provide some balance, I guess, to the development of public policy for the future of the Internet.

The OECD is a really remarkable organization. It has earned an important reputation for its ability to publish reports that tell us about the world as it is evolving and the very rapid adoption of new technologies, broadband networks, changes in literacy around the world, as well is to help formulate principles that can guide national governments and inform business practices to help safeguard important interests.

In many respects I think Andy Wyckoff was correct this morning when he said that the OECD makes you do your homework. But it is important homework to do, because it is homework that helps inform public policy discussions about how to make choices about the type of future we would like to have.

There is a lot of discussion about choice in terms of the marketplace, which Web browser to use, which online social network service to use, you know, who has really cool photo software, and so on. But in the end I think the choices that we end up making at the macro level, the policy choices that we make are the ones that reflect the quality of society that we will live in.

I would also like to suggest to you that the benefits of this new world tend to take care of themselves. It's the problems that will need attention.

Just to highlight some of the key areas of concern that civil society groups have identified, we are interested in approaches that governments are developing toward consumer protection, efforts to promote broadband deployment, efforts to encourage competition, which might seem surprising when things are changing so rapidly, but things can also consolidated quickly as well and we think that issue needs a lot of attention, privacy and security of course, and also respect for different cultures around the world.

In North America we tend to view communications policy in terms of the Internet and the desktop, but of course for most people they understand it in terms of the cell phone.

We are enthusiastic, obviously, about the vibrant marketplace innovation, literacy and education, but at the same time we also believe that a good approach, a balanced approach, one that incorporates the views of civil society, will help ensure not only that the benefits are realized, but that the problems are addressed early on.

MR. ALHADEFF: I, too, will join in by giving my thanks to the OECD and Industry Canada for the opportunity to be here. I will only take the allotted time because apparently my avatar is listed also in the program and must be having a presentation in Second Life as we speak.

The fact that we are in Ottawa, and both Mark and I are kind of ‑‑ we had been in Ottawa 10 years ago for the ministerial as well ‑‑ it made me think that perhaps one of the reflections from a business point of view was the difference and the evolution between Ottawa and Seoul.

When we were in the Ottawa the Web was kind of a revolution, it was that new thing, it was that shiny, squeaky new toy. Now it seems like it's much more part of our lives and it's much more commonplace. In fact, the evolution is occurring so quickly that we don't even notice of.

That's one of the places where I think the OECD has an important role to play, because it's some of these kind of momentous events that happen without notice because of the fact that it is part of the fabric of our lives that need to be highlighted. So we think about Ottawa and it was ecommerce; you think about Seoul, it's just commerce now.

At that time it was a department and a business; now it's the concept of information flows. Then it was the idea of an isolated enterprise using technology inside the enterprise; now it's the concept of a value chain and an ecosystem and how information flows across those ecosystems.

As you look at the participatory Web, one of the main roles the OECD has to play in this phase is looking at how the creativity, the confidence and the convergence, the three C's that are the subtext of the ministerial, work together across all stakeholder communities in order to make sure that we are delivering and Internet and a future that enables economic growth and provides societal benefit, because those are the two hallmarks of what we are looking for in this space.

I think when we look at the growing pains of the ecosystem a number of the issues that Mark raised are exactly those growing pains ‑‑ and also that Michael raised ‑‑ the concept of responsibility, net neutrality, intermediary liability, the role of government, the emerging role of business, the different roles that civil society takes on, the role of the consumer, the role of the citizen. All of these are morphing, to an extent, and they are morphing in a situation that is perhaps a little less obvious than it's been before.

Because, in many ways, when we have listened to various panels there's a concern because I don't exactly know what's happening to my information, I don't exactly understand everything that happens in the magic in the box on my lap or on my belt or wherever it is. It's understanding what the frameworks are to make those things more real, more trustworthy, to understand that the pathways are converging across the media because the information has been digitized, and making sense of these as we go into the future.

Looking at the future of the Internet, that is one of the roles where the OECD plays a very beneficial role and where I think the ministerial, you know, is an important place to stop and do a stock‑take. I think that's one of the importances we see here, and look forward to questions on this topic.

MS BATTISTI: Well, thank you, Mike, and, of course, thank you to the OECD.

I think that this event is very important and, in a way, I see, as Michael said before, as a second step towards a definition of a digital content framework, something that, by the way, the Working Party on the Information Economy is working on.

Of course, when we started this forum, the impression was that, in a way, participation is almost the equivalent of a process of democratization, but during the day this impression, in a way, remained just an impression, and the reality was quite different.

The idea that everybody who participates in a way represents a large community, I think is not true, and here I see a role for policy‑makers, especially in terms of digital literacy.

Also, another important point that was raised by other speakers is responsibility, because, of course, if you have the right and the opportunity to publish something, I think you have also the responsibility of publishing in the right way and publishing by the rules.

Of course, for young people, for instance, it's not easy. Last year, in Italy, we had a couple of very controversial postings on uTube. That, of course, is something that we should avoid and, of course, responsibility not just on the users' side, but probably on the infrastructure providers'.

Again, I think I see that here government can do something, not so much in terms of a regulation, but maybe thinking about other ways. I'm sure that five years ago I would have never believed myself saying that, but I think that things have changed a lot. So we cannot just look at the past and avoid to look at the present, or, as Michael put it in a nice way, the elephant's in the room.

The other point I think is very important is that most of the young people who use uTube, MySpace or whatever, any other social network, are not aware of what they are doing, in the sense that they are not aware that they are creating content and that someone else may use this content or gather information about their behaviour and do whatever they want with their own data.

Of course, we talk a lot about trust and privacy, but I think this is a government responsibility. Of course, there are so many other controversial issues, but, okay, for me it's all over.

MR. BESGROVE: Well, thank you, Michael. Thank you also to the OECD.

I have just finished two days of the Working Party on Information, Security and Privacy, which I chair. One of the things that we were talking about was RFID. The work that we have been doing there is the direct outcome of a forum just like this one two years ago. So in case you are wondering what the OECD does with these sorts of events, they usually lead to at least some activity by some of the working parties.

Anyway, I was just going to come at this from a slightly different perspective. When I was a student in the sixties and the seventies in Australia, many people, myself included, thought that technology would ultimately enable governments to control us all. We had very much a 1984 vision in those days.

Today, as a policy‑maker in Australian and chair of the WISP, I often find myself listening to presentations that are still based on this assumption. Each new technology seems to be assumed to be liberty and privacy diminishing, and, to an extent, many of them are, or they could be, if we could get them to work properly.

But the reality is that the Internet, and its related technologies, have also often been remarkably subversive of government control. They have also been disruptive for governments, themselves, who have increasingly had to adapt their models, their systems and their operations to cope with the Internet.

The emergence of the participative web is, in my view, compounding these challenges to policy‑makers posed by the rise of the Internet in the first place. At a recent Sydney conference, a fellow called Mark Pesce said that he thought that the 21st century was likely to be akin to a low‑level, ongoing civil war, with governments trying to exert control over citizens and citizens continually using the Internet to find new ways around such control.

His view was that if even the most repressive governments could not control content in interactions on the web, then OECD governments had comparatively little hope.

Whether you accept this view or not, it is clear that the participative web poses some interesting challenges for policy‑makers, and we have heard of many of them today already, such as privacy and security, which keeps coming up, and particularly content issues, including finding ways to reward or penalize the creators of content, depending upon the kind of content and where they put it.

So it seems to me that this is a valuable opportunity to reflection, and one of the roles that the OECD can certainly play, and is playing through this forum, is to help policy‑makers to research, to analyze and to understand emerging technology issues and to inform policy‑makers. So that's certainly the value I see in today.

I will conclude there. Thank you.

MR. ANDERSON: Thank you.

Well, I guess I get lucky to be the last speaker on a very long day.

Michael asked me to make sure that we are a little bit controversial to stimulate some debate, so hopefully I can be a little bit controversial and we can stimulate some debate to round the day off.

First of all, this session is talking about opportunities and challenges, and so I have looked at it in respect of opportunities and what the challenges are. One of the opportunities that the OECD has recognized is that the participative web and the web will create employment. But there are a number of challenges with that creation of employment, not the least of which for the policy‑makers is what kind of employment is that going to be and what should policy-makers be doing to ensure that their employment is good employment, that there is no discrimination in that employment against all the workers, for example, who may not be able to participate to the same degree?

What kind of skills and training do we need? We have had nothing today, unfortunately, on the skills, the training, the kind of workers that we are going to need to be able to participate in this new challenge and in the employment that's being created, we hope, by the web.

The other opportunity is that the free market and innovation are going to create amazing new services, but for workers, actually, free market and innovation also is a problem for them in how are their wages going to be paid? I'm talking about creative workers. Intellectual property and creative rights has been one of the issues that's been discussed here regularly today, and it's one of the challenges for us.

Actually, 20 years ago workers used to be concerned about blackguards wearing masks and shotguns steeling their wages from the payroll van. Well, frankly, now workers are now worried about the blaggers who are manipulating their computers to steal their wagers, because creator's rights are their wages and, you know, we're concerned, as unions, and we want to see better policy on creator's rights.

Does open innovation and innovation, does that mean it's an invitation to take unpaid work for profit by companies? Take for profit, unpaid, the creative rights that others have developed? So that's a challenge I think that today I don't have an answer for and I don't think we have had an answer from today, and that's a challenge for the policy makers.

The other opportunity is, you know, is telework and the fact that we can use that much more to get a result for the problems that we have with global warming and with climate change.

But the challenge for us is only where there is going to be affordable access, and I think again today that one of the main issues that has come up from the debate is about how do we get open access and how do we get better access to affordable Broadband services.

Actually, you know, speed matters. That's something that we all need to know. I mean, ask Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso. Speed definitely matters. And it does with the Internet, as well. And we have a problem when, you know, Verizon who is just across the border there is saying that they're only fibre into the home, and 40% of their network. That's a problem, that's a challenge for us. And that's not unique to United States; it's a challenge to the world.

The other opportunity is, everyone has talked about democracy and freedom of expression and the opportunity that the participative web brings with that for people. Actually, trade unions are using that opportunity and that freedom of expression quite well. Actually, last week there were two virtual strikes on SecondLife. You might have seen apologies to our providers over lunch, but there was a virtual strike against IBM and a virtual strike against the Dutch Telecom Company KPN last week, and that's an opportunity for people to make their view and the protest known. But the challenges are the gatekeepers that are keeping the gates, companies who can stop Internet access. In a recent strike that there was here in Canada, one of the telecom companies actually bought the access for the union's website. So, frankly, you know, there are challenges there for us.

Burma. Absolutely, we see the challenge in Burma where the government is stopping access for people to show what's happening in their country in Burma. So, I think, again, for the policy makers, we have to think about those challenges.

Finally, I just wanted to say that access -- I come back to that. Access for people is hugely important. It's not just important for the OECD countries, but if we're going to make the global economy work, then we have to have access for everybody and, frankly, the access in developing countries is worse than pathetic. And it is worse than pathetic because everyone has run down the line of thinking that while this will solve everything and no one has put any investment into fixed line in the developing countries. And, at the moment, fixed line is where the opportunities are for getting fast network access. And so we have to think very carefully, as the policy makers, as to what kind of policies need to be put in place to ensure there is access outside of the OECD as communications is a two-way thing. It doesn't work unless it goes both way. And at the moment, it's going one way.

The very last word is about this is a participative web conference and yet the participation from other than business, trade unions and governments is very poor. And I don't know the answer to that. I don't know the reason why. Perhaps there were not enough invitations. Perhaps there was not enough thought put into who needed to participate. We don't have any children here who are on the u-Tube or My Space. We don't have any of those participants in the web here giving us their views on what's going on. So, I think to make it a participative web conference we have to be much better.

I think in 1998 there was a declaration from the Ministerial about participation of civil society, and that's never come about, and I think it's time that we looked at that.

Thank you.

MR. GEIST: Well, thanks, Neil. I would like to encourage the people who we do have here, and Mark noted that there are a number of civil society groups here who came together. But I would like to invite you to come up and pose some questions or just provide comments on some of your takeaways.

I thought it interesting that even amongst the panellist's comments, we had a number of issues raised that I didn't hear a lot about over the course of the day, ranging from the very outset to the role government plays with respect to infrastructure -- a sensitive topic in some jurisdictions who think it is best left to the private sector, yet, clearly, in some places, has played a pivotal role in dealing with issues; and, Neil's comments just now about the impact on labour and the role that all of this has on labour.

While you're thinking about your questions and making your way to the microphone, I'd like to ask the panellists a couple of questions of my own. One, is, that Joe made reference to the value in stock-taking, and I think we all recognize that there is a lot of value in stock-taking, and, indeed, so many of the OECD output, some of the research I think provides a great deal of value. But, in this area, the speed with which, and the rapidity with which things are changing sometimes leave me wondering about the value of some of that stock-taking; if you're simply unable to effectively implement it into relevant policy.

We had Bob Young on one of the panels earlier today I think make a bet with the audience, not a real bet but just a suggestion bet that in a number of years' time he would bet that of the ten most popular sites on the Internet five of them are ones that we have not heard of today. It is moving that quickly.

Given that even in Rome less than two years ago, I don't think a word was uttered about the world of u-Tube and Facebook and the like. My guess is that when many people here meet in Korea, there will be a site or development that was scarcely, if at all, mentioned here today, but yet as emerged in the months that have intervened.

How valuable -- how can we ensure that the stock-taking is relevant?

And I open it up to anyone on the panel.

MR. ROTENBERG: Well, I just wanted to answer you, Michael, with a reference to a wonderful science fiction movie that some of you may be familiar with, and that's Ridley Scott's Blade Runner which is, this year, celebrating it's twenty-fifth anniversary. A new Director's Cut is out and apparently it's supposed to be absolutely gorgeous. But, what's remarkable about that film, as fans of the film know, that virtually every high tech company that's featured in that 1982 movie no longer exists. Atari, for example, and there were a few others as well. So I think there's a lot to be said for how quickly things change.

Nonetheless -- nonetheless, and this is a really key point about the OECD, I think in many ways this organization has been very forward looking as to its mission. Because, if you think about it for a moment, what the OECD sought to do, beginning in the seventies and eighties, was to anticipate the policy frameworks of a world that would increasingly be shaped by globalization, by international trade, a world where national laws didn't have quite the same bite when companies and consumers were interacting across borders.

So, in many respects, the policy work that's been done and the questions that have been asked I think give us, if you will, sort of a running start on the Internet economy and some of the challenges we face today.

MR. ALHADEFF: I would say, I mean, you know, there's a reason why I think the Ministerial is entitled the Future of the Internet. The Ministerial concept is not ‘Let's look in the rearview mirror and figure out life, you know, five years ago and see if it's relevant to us still.' I think the idea is the stock-take is in order to better understand how things are working, but it's not limited to just saying ‘Let's look behind' it's also incorporating ‘Let's look ahead' and it's thinking about, you know, you have new technologies and new ways of doing business and new ways of governing, and new ways of social interaction, and all of them are moving at Internet.

There was a product line at one time called Life At Internet Speed. I don't remember what the product was, but it was a good tag line.

The idea is, as you look at these, you have to take a look both forward and backward to understand where you are, and I think that's what the OECD is well positioned to do.

So, I think, you know, yeah, if you take a look at research and the fact that research has numbers and it takes time to crunch the numbers and those will always be attempting to catch up to where we are. But, if you take a look at policy frameworks, part of what they are doing is attempting to rationalize also where we're going, and help make sure that we're going in the right direction in a way that supports responsible use of information and doesn't overly constrain innovation and helps you go to those places so that you can reach the possibilities of the new technologies and constrain, where possible, the problems that may be inherent in them.

MR. BESGROVE: I would just make the comment that I don’t believe that policymakers should respond to rapidly changing ephemera, things that come and go quickly should come and go quickly. Policies should be more concerned with significant change and particularly fundamental changes that technology brings on society and on economy and on the way we interact.

So yes, things change quickly, but sometimes we can ignore some of those things because they do change so quickly. I think the OECD and policymakers should be much more concerned with the deep-seeded changes that the technology brings about. One example, the impact of broadband on education and the way in which the internet, enabled through high speed broadband, can actually change teaching models that have been around for thousands of years and change them probably forever and what does that mean for education?

So I think we should be more concerned with the underlying societal and economic changes and not be distracted by this year’s product versus last year’s product.

MR. GEIST: I will give Milton a chance in just a second. But just to follow-up with that, how do we distinguish between what is ephemera and what is having that long-term impact? I mean, someone might have taken a look at YouTube a year and a half ago and suggested that well, it is just video, it is not really a particularly big deal until suddenly it starts having an impact on elections and a whole range of different things and we realize that it is actually something that it is having quite a profound change in a range of areas.

MR. BESGROVE: We sometimes get that wrong, but I think by starting with the question do we think this is actually going to make a significant difference or is this just, you know, the latest buzzword? And sometimes you have no alternative but to give it a bit of time to analyze that.

One last thing I would say is while the OECD is often playing catch-up mode, sometimes the OECD has analyzed things years before they became important to society. The OECD has sometimes been very good at getting an idea of what was emerging and analyzing it quite early.

MR. GEIST: Milton.

QUESTION: A topic that I haven’t heard much about today is global governance. If you go back to 10 years to the first OECD meeting, 1998 was a time of very significant institutional changes. You had ICANN being formed, the framework for electronic commerce in the U.S., you had new WIPO treaties, you had digital millennium Copyright Act, and you had kind of an overarching perspective on the internet economy that I don’t see here.

Do you think that there is any need for major institutional changes at the global level that would pave the way for new initiatives in the way we actually make policy? The WTO, for example, another thing that came from the late 1990s, the agreements on telecom services. What I see is that the globalization associated with the internet is really grinding to a halt in many areas, that there is a new trade protectionism in different countries, there is bordering of the internet by blocking and filtering, they is attempts to linguistically border the internet. I am interested in your approach to the globalization on the internet.

MR. GEIST: Who wants to try tackling that?

MR. BESGROVE: I can’t give you a terribly satisfactory answer, but certainly within the working party on information security and privacy we have looked at some of the responses to issues that cross borders in terms of things like spam and malicious software, privacy and so on. And it is very clear to us at the moment that there are some gaps which are currently being met by informal mechanisms. And our judgment is that those informal mechanisms are quite valuable and we are suggesting that it is probably worth thinking about ways that we could support them better.

It also seems to us that it is a bit early to do much more than accept that those informal mechanisms are playing an important role in a growing space. And it is certainly one of the things that we will be putting forward for consideration within the context of the ministerial. I can’t really give you a more satisfactory answer than that. It is certainly something that a lot of people are looking at, but there is not much clarity and there is no consensus whatsoever to respond to your question.

MR. ALHADEFF: I will take a shot at taking a slightly different attack at it. And I think if you go back to the time of the Ottawa Ministerial, I mean, it was a new concept and we had the idea of, you know, there was going to be the technology solves all was kind of permeating through some of the hallways at that time.

And, you know, I think we had a lot of papers that were written on a global basis at that time and they started running into the fact that there are nation states, they started running into the fact that there are legal and cultural norms that vary across countries and economies. And they started understanding and becoming a little more mature, because it went from idea to application. And the application started facing a lot of real world realities.

And I think where people are now is not that there is, you know, the one-size-fits-all solution, but rather that you have to focus on the interoperability of solutions so that you can get things done on a global basis while still respecting what our cultural norms, legal paradigms and, you know, whatever happens at the more local level, so you have the concept of global and local working together and having the individual thrown in there too, because in some cases it is personal.

So I think all those are in the mix now and what we are really looking at is how to create environments where these issues become more interoperable so that you can try to respect as much of that as possible while still actually taking a global perspective.

MR. ROTENBERG: I just want to say briefly, I mean, Milton makes a very important point about 1998 in fact. There was a lot of discussion certainly about internet governance, but I would say that I think maybe over the last 10 years, you know, in some respects what we have learned is that the internet resists governance. I mean, for so many different reasons and in so many different respects, you know, both individuals and businesses and everyone pretty much really doesn’t want someone else to tell them what to do.

Now, having said that, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t important policy decisions about the internet being made. And so whereas I think it might be a mistake to look for formal governance institutions and say how do we recreate that for the internet, I think it would be an equal mistake to ignore the fact that significant decisions regarding the internet whether it is, you know, who is or the addition of another top level domain or whether a country, you know, can sort of take its own domain, you know, offline are absolutely critical issues.

So what we have tried to do over the last 10 years through public voice and some other project is basically to say where these decisions are occurring let us ensure that there is good representation of the stakeholders and of civil society so that those decisions are meaningful, legitimate and valid.

That process looks very different from traditional decision making, because we don’t have votes and we don’t have elected members, but I think it is actually vital to make work. Because I am afraid and I think Milton shares this concern, that if we don’t develop good governance-like models, then a lot of power flows very quickly to a small number of institutions and organizations and corporations and I don’t think it in the end people want that.

I think we want sort of the openness and that includes the decision making process as well.

MR. GEIST: Genevieve.

QUESTION: Hi, I am one representative of Civil Society and I am representing, in a way, a Canadian consumer because I am from a consumer organization. I am based here in Montreal, Quebec, but active at the Canadian level also.

Maybe I will be a little down to earth right now. But Ms Battisti, if I well understand, talked about digital literacy. And we were talking about access and participation and I think this is one area where OECD and governments may want to play a role, is to make sure that everybody in every country has access to that magnificent Participative Web.

And the second thing, one thing that strikes me earlier this morning is when we are talking about the monetization of the web, this is clearly an issue for a consumer representative because more and more product and service are offered only by the web. And this is not talking about e-government where a government want to -- has to participate by the web but if we have a price to pay, this is very unusual and not very good.

So, thank you.

MS BATTISTI: Thank you for your question.

Well there is a problem here because we see, we experience in Italy. But I think in also other countries that the educational system as a whole, it’s slower than students themselves.

So, even if, I think Italy but also many other OECD countries had embraced the recommendation, the broadband recommendation, OECD recommendation in trying to develop broadband infrastructure and content and especially educational content. This is not happening in the way governments probably thought that it would happen.

So, I see and I will of course go back home and try to work on this that still digital literacy is an issue for students, for teachers and also for family especially because I still believe that this participation is really limited to a digital elite or technocratic elite. And I think that this can be very, very dangerous.

Access to content, again, two years ago I was attending a conference in Vienna I think it was on digital content. And I don’t remember who but at a certain point it was said that we should not have one gatekeeper to knowledge. And of course they were implying Google. And I thought that was a very strong statement.

But now, after two years, I’m afraid that I have to agree with that statement because we cannot allow access to content in the hands of just one provider. So, I think that’s an issue and especially it’s an issue in terms of privacy and trust and consumer rights.

MR. GEIST: Thanks.

Before I get to Rob, I had a question for Mr. Ko. The reference to government role with respect to infrastructure and how that can in a sense address neutrality has of course been extraordinarily controversial, certainly in North America, about the role that a government does play in that.

Many of us are looking forward to experiencing, you know, the highly acclaimed infrastructure in Korea. And I was wondering if you might expand a little bit on that issue.

MR. KO: I just like to clarify my position about government role in infrastructure investment. I do believe that government should play a pivotal role in infrastructure investment but not by direct intervention but by wise competition policy.

For the case of Korea, we push for facility based competition rather than service based competition. And direct investment of the government to this infrastructure is less than 5 percent. It’s 3 point something, so it’s not high at all.

But we push for this facility based competition. When you push for facility based competition you have the perils of all overinvestment because it entails large fixed costs for each service provider.

But benefit of the competition outweighed this large fixed cost investment. That’s why that infrastructure in Korea was mainly done by the privately sector, more than 95 percent.

MR. GEIST: Thanks for that clarification.

Neil did you have any thoughts on the role government plays with respect to this issue?

MR. ANDERSON: I had some thoughts actually on the previous speaker too which I wouldn’t mind -- that was about the digital education, et cetera. And I see that in that case there is a real problem with employers trying to ensure that their workers also participate in the changes that are taking place and get education.

You know, companies spend a lot of money building car parks but they don’t spend so much money (laughter) finding ways to get theirwomen workers who might be coming to work, to get them to work or to get them to get some education or to get their older workers who now must continue to be in the workforce because of the way the world is changing to get some education.

So I think that’s a real challenge for us is also getting to their homes as well, the access to the internet so that they can participate in the new types of education and they can continue to be useful in the workforce in with the web. I think that’s something that we need to look closely at.

And it comes back again, I think, to access and investment and giving opportunities for investment from many different sources. There has been an emphasis on open and free market investment. And frankly that hasn’t worked entirely. And we see regulators around the world now trying to look at ways to encourage investment, sometimes by splitting companies up. You know, there’s a lot of debate about splitting telecom companies to try and encourage investment.

And I think we’re in the danger of putting things into little boxes and not encouraging investment in many different ways: investments from government, investment to ensure that all communities participate, that there is investment in rural areas from government, you know, or there is an assurance that there is going to be a return on investment because sometimes there needs to be a return on investment.

And that brings us to the old problem of price control and control of price of access. So...

MR. GEIST: Thanks for that.

I note that we’re getting close to running up against the reception. So, we’ve got two speakers at the mikes. I think we’ll actually take both of their questions together, as concise as possible and then open it up to any members of the panel to respond quickly and move on.

So, go ahead Rob.

QUESTION: Rob Crowhall from the Ontario Research Network for Electronic Commerce.

One of things I hadn’t heard about so much today which we are seeing a lot of through our research programs, is the role of the participative web in health and health policy and both through the, what I call non-institutionalized health, people finding information and also from health care supply chains. And I just suggest that as a focus of policy with the participative web involvement, health care along with education are two areas that I would have expected to have perhaps heard a bit more.

I’d also just like to make a comment on behalf, as a researcher in this area, the OECD data is a tremendous source of trying to actually put value on things that are just emerging and actually does allow you to get into an economic dialogue about tradeoffs. And I find that extremely useful.

MR. GEIST: Thanks for that.

QUESTION: In fact, this is another cry for another policy area in some ways. I’m Vladimir Skok of the Canadian Cultural Observatory, culture.ca and Canadian Heritage.

What I came to look and hear of today we have danced around it. We have talked about creativity, intellectual property, workers' rights, creativity rights. There was some talk about identity, but another major policy area that also is being affected of course is cultural policy, whether it's a sound recording, which the whole structure has changed, the film industry, broadcasting where work is being done now.

I know the ministerial has a theme called "creativity", but when we are talking about defining it narrowly it has been defined quite narrowly and of course this is the OECD.

But the issues that are facing the other sectors that we are talking about are very much facing the cultural sector and those challenges and needing to understand the trends, especially when you look at deep, profound changes that were suggested in terms of citizen participation and their identity, you know, active access to your culture and your stories, how are those issues going to be dealt with?

MR. GEIST: Health and culture. Any responses from any of the panellists?

Mark? Keith?

MR. ROTENBERG: I would just mention ‑‑ and I guess this is more of an anecdote than a policy recommendation ‑‑ a number of years ago I worked on a UNESCO Advisory Council and one of the projects that the Advisory Council pursued was a project called "Memories of the World". The goal was to create an online museum, if you will, of many of the great cultural icons. There was one that really sort of stuck in my mind and you will understand in a moment why it was significant.

This was in the late 1990s and they were going around the world and capturing digital images and one of the most striking digital images was of two very tall stone Buddhas in Afghanistan that were recognized by UNESCO and put on the Internet and made accessible to people around the worlds.

As the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in the '90s there was a moment ‑‑ and I don't remember the year exactly but it was before 2001 ‑‑ where they actually destroyed the stone Buddhas. These were very large, monumental objects and they collapsed. But they remained online because of the UNESCO project called "Memories of the World".

I don't know, of course, what the grand answer will be for intellectual property that balances the rights of creators and of users, that continues to be a very big debate, but it struck me in this moment that there is an ability in this new digital world to preserve and to expand and to extend so much around us that we might not otherwise see and I hope that is something that people will continue to pursue.

MR. BESGROVE: I had a not dissimilar initial comment.

It is not a direct answer your question, but one of the things that I have been struck by is the expansion of the Internet is making it possible to preserve languages that would otherwise die, to enable indigenous people to be able to create repositories and to retain them and share them.

So I think from that cultural perspective the growth of the Web has been enormously important.

As to the broader question of its impact on cultural policy, I can't comment from any depth of knowledge other than to say it's a very vibrant and lively policy debate in my own country and I'm sure it is in many others.

As to the question in relation to health care and education, again from the perspective of my own country, we are already seeing quite substantial changes in the nature of education and that is based on using the Web and using high‑speed broadband to change the nature of classroom interactions, indeed to change the scale of classrooms. So I think again that's a very important and very vibrant space.

In my own country in relation to health care, I think we are further behind but others may be able to comment from the perspective of other countries.

MR. ALHADEFF: I will just take a quick shot at the health care one, which is the ‑‑ I mean, the idea that information and communication technologies are really going into the field. It's more than just the electronic health record concept, it's the concept of remote access to medical expertise from a developing country to a developed country; it's from a city to rural area, all these kinds of interactions, the portability of health records so that when you are in a foreign country and you get hurt and you go to the hospital there is a way to find out what the needed treatments are.

And they don't come without issues and they don't come without problems. So you have privacy issues, security issues, lots of issues which are all part of the mix of being dealt with and some of the OECD work reflects that even if it's not specific to health care at the moment.

So I just wanted to say, it is part of the ferment and it is a huge issue and some of this work does touch in that space.

MR. GEIST: Thanks, Joe.

I think it has been an exceptionally rich day. Clearly both the panel and the audience have brought out any number of additional issues that we didn't really have a chance to get into it in any great detail.

I had asked the panel and they did a great job of being very concise with just an early series of remarks. We are going to close with one more request to ask them to be even more concise.

Amidst all of these various issues, if you could give me a one‑sentence the key takeaway that you take from these various issues. Perhaps we will work our way back in the other direction, starting with Neil and coming back towards me.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, one key sentence is innovation and creating employment, but we need to think about how the affects that employment and involving the workers in developing policy that gives them better employment, better jobs.

MR. BESGROVE: Well, I have been struck by the contradiction of both rewarding creators and also controlling creators and that's certainly an interesting policy dilemma that I will take away.

MS BATTISTI: Well, from my point of view it's this idea that we are still confusing codifying knowledge with the wisdom of the crowd and without remembering that "wisdom of the crowd" was an expression used by Hitler and Mussolini.

MR. ROTENBERG: I'm not sure how to follow that one.

‑‑‑ Laughter

MR. ROTENBERG: Maybe I have a joke.

For me, I think it's what we need to do to capitalize on the opportunity and limit the problem, because that's really where the rubber hits the road, to use an American expression.

MR. KO: Well, picking up privacy for just a brief moment, I think we need to think about the long‑term consequences of projecting so much of our physical selves into this digital world and what the long‑term consequences will be when so many aspects of our personality are available to others.

I don't think we really thought about that and I think about that with my kids, who are both on Facebook and putting things out for millions of Internet users that I never knew.

MR. KO: For me, given the incentive to the most skilled and knowledgeable workers to actively participate in participative Web, I think that's the key question, including non‑English speaking citizens in the world.

MR. GEIST: Thanks. And for what it's worth, for me and I think I was Sasha's question asking about what do kids, the teenagers and preteens, think are the key policy issues and the recognition that none of them sit in this room and yet they are the ones that have to live with the policy choices that were made back in 1998 when my daughter was three months old and will have to live with the choices that are made next June.

But I hope you will join me in thanking the entire panel for a what I think has been a terrific discussion.

‑‑‑ Applause

MR. OXLEY: Thank you, Michael.

That was actually a phenomenal panel and a phenomenal end to a wonderful day. There has been great conversation and great topics.

‑‑‑ Upon recessing at 6:09 p.m.