Opening remarks

So, the conference has opened with the Canadian government’s Michael Binder reflecting on a meeting that happened 10 years ago in this very room.

It was an OECD ministerial meeting about e-commerce, how this new network was going to allow for new business models. “Some of us believe that meeting started the Net revolution,” Binder said. Whether that is true or not, it does reveal the importance and impact that these OECD meetings have and seriously they are taken by the world's governments and economies.

Binder quoted the companies that are in everyone’s minds today – Google, eBay, YouTube, Second Life – and pointed out that 10 years ago these companies simply didn’t exist or were little more than pipe dreams. But not only are these companies now household names but they represent just the frontrunners of a whole new electronic economy. The panellists at the meeting are, Binder explained,  “representative of vastness and variety of Internet economy today.”

He closed his opening comments by saying he was looking to forward to “lively discussion and policy debate”.

OECD perspective

This line of thinking was picked up Susanne Hutter of the OECD who explained this was her first meeting representing the organisation.

She also referred back to the OECD ministerial meeting in Ottawa in 1998 that “set the ball rolling”, and pressed home that Amazon, Google and eBay were nothing but fledgling start-ups.

These companies have created “entirely new ways of doing business”, she argued, and have produced the “foundations for markets that are still expanding and changing”. This “fast-paced, changeable and unpredictable” marketplace is precisely the reason she joined the OECD, Huttner explained.

The meeting was about the OECD “ stepping up to the plate” she said using an American baseball analogy, and the meeting and the Seoul ministerial meeting next year is a way to “check course” on these Internet markets.

Brief examples she gave were the way that individuals are changing journalism, and the way new tools are changing the way we have political dialogue. “One of the challenges,” she explained, “is  how balance governing efficiently and fairly with the remarkable opportunities these technologies present – and how quickly they change and how unpredictably they change.”

And with that, the conference opens proper.