This snapshot taken on 26/07/2008, shows web content selected for preservation by The National Archives. External links, forms and search boxes may not work in archived websites.
The Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitte-Commerce Strategy Presentation by the Minister for e-Commerce, Harvard Information Infrastructure Project |
 |
|
| (Click picture for biography) | |
The United Kingdom?s e-Commerce Strategy Presentation by Patricia Hewitt MP, Minister for e-Commerce Chairman, thank you for inviting me to join you here today. As the United Kingdom?s first e-Minister, it is a great pleasure for me to have the opportunity of a discussion with such a distinguished gathering. But my priority was to come here to Boston. To meet Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the World Wide Web Consortium. To learn from the Things That Think project at the MIT Media Lab. We are also pleased to be involved in developing the recently agreed collaboration between Cambridge and MIT aimed at enabling the transfer of key entrepreneurial skills across the Atlantic. When Tony Blair appointed me as the Government?s e-commerce Minister ? just three Internet years ago ? he challenged our country to become the best place in the world for e-commerce within the next two years. That may sound like an impossible dream. After all, most Americans know that the USA leads in this new economy. And most Europeans would agree. Closing the technology gap But the technology gap is closing fast. And in some areas, it is Europe that leads the way. The first wave of the Internet came through PCs. But the next wave will come through broadband mobile telephony and digital television. In both, the United Kingdom in particular ? and Europe more generally ? have a pretty impressive lead. Mobile phones have now reached 40% of the UK market. Amongst 14 year olds, 1 in 3 boys and nearly 1 in 2 girls have a mobile phone. I can assure you, it?s even higher in my daughter?s school. And of course, in Scandinavia, it?s even higher. Ten days ago, I launched the world?s first auction for third generation mobile telephone spectrum. Thirteen bidders including Global Crossing and MCI/Worldcom from the USA took part. Third generation mobile will give us the Internet on the move. Everything we now get from our televisions and computers, our video players, camcorders, digital cameras and good old voice telephones - all on our telephones, our PDAs, our laptops and palmtops, and a host of new devices now emerging from the research labs. Digital television - interactive television ? is also taking off. It?s only just begun. But we?ve already seen penetration increase from zero to almost 3 million in little over a year. The increase in take-up is even faster than in the Internet itself. The United Kingdom is unique in driving forward digital television on three different platforms ... through cable, through satellite, and through digital terrestrial. Both digital TV and third generation mobile will bring the Internet to millions of people who don?t want to use a PC in their living-room. Both are technologies where the UK is a world leader. And both are creating extraordinary opportunities for new businesses, new applications, new services and new jobs. That is why we?re seeing venture capitalists, technology and telecoms companies, and individual entrepreneurs flocking to the UK, confirming our position as the single most popular destination for inward investment into Europe. Strategy We?re determined to keep it that way - and to do even better. The revolution is driven by the market. But government has a role too. Not to dictate. Not to control. We couldn?t even if we wanted to. But to enable and to empower. We have to get the market framework right. We have to get the people right. Making sure we have people with the skills and the confidence to operate as citizens, as consumers and as workers in the new economy. And we have to make government itself a leading-edge user of the new technologies. Markets It might help if I say a bit more about what we?re doing to create a dynamic market framework. It is partly about leading-edge communications markets, as I?ve already indicated. It?s about driving competition further and faster into those markets, bringing prices down and giving consumers more choice. As you may know, we don?t have in the UK your American model of unmetered local calls that have helped to make Internet access so easy. But in the last week alone, we?ve seen four different companies offering new, unmetered Internet packages. And in the UK, subscription free ISPs are already commonplace. As the new tariffs come into effect, it will almost certainly mean that for the average Internet user at home or in business, the UK will be cheaper than anywhere else in Europe. It is also about getting the law right. Our electronic communications bill will mean legal recognition for electronic signatures - and allow us to update decades, indeed centuries, of laws that refer to paper and post. Getting the market framework right within the United Kingdom is vital. But the big prize will come when we create a single European market for electronic commerce ? a single market of 370 million people. We have already agreed a directive on electronic signatures that introduces legal recognition of signatures throughout the EU and sets voluntary standards for certificate providers. We are well on the way to agreeing a new directive that will remove legal barriers to electronic commerce in the single market. It will boost consumer confidence and make it far easier for a business based in one country to sell on-line in the fourteen other member states. We are working with intermediaries and rightsholders to reach agreement on copyright issues arising in on-line transmission. All this is based on the principles of flexibility and partnership with business and consumers, so that Europe can engage positively with the US and others in international e-commerce regulatory developments. Government But Government itself has to change to take advantage of the new technologies. We need to transform relationships between government and citizen by delivering services on-line. And we need to transform policy-making by managing government online. In the UK, our strategy for e-government is shaped by our view of the new technologies. We want people to be able to access government anywhere and anytime. From a computer. A mobile device. A television. A kiosk in a post office or a shopping mall. So the challenge to us is to make government content, and government services, available across all our networks - wired and wireless - to all the devices. It?s exactly the same challenge that the content providers in the private sector are facing. For instance, Reuters ? a company that 150 years ago began to use carrier pigeons to deliver fast, accurate financial markets information ? is now integrating content, and delivering it real-time to market analysts and retail investors alike on the trading screen, the television screen and the mobile phone. But we also have to re-engineer government on the inside. Like every major global company, we have to move from vertical silos to horizontal processes. We have to move from inputs to outcomes. And we have to use ICT to enable all that to happen. Like most governments and most corporations, we have to contend with legacy systems. E-mail systems that don?t talk to each other. Different data standards. In the next few weeks, however, we will be publishing a single set of standards for inter-operability across government. We?re following the lead of business by adopting open, I/P based standards for all government systems. Making the browser the key interface for access and manipulation of all information. Adopting XML as the cornerstone for government data inter-operability and integration. And working with the global Govtalk consortium to create the infrastructure we need for implementation. The next wave ? e-science All of this is important. And it?s going to be pretty disruptive. But essentially what is happening at the moment is the exploitation by business and government, citizens and consumers of the Internet that was originally created by the science and technology research community in the 1970s and early 80?s. But what we can now see coming is a new wave of massive computing and communications power ? again, driven by the explosion of scientific data. The new Large Hadron Collider at Geneva ? a truly global international collaboration ? will probe the nature of the fundamental forces and particles of the universe. When it commences operation in 2005 it will generate raw data at the rate of 1 petabyte per second ? that?s 1 million gigabytes. The Human Genome Project, led by laboratories in the USA and the UK will soon sequence the genome of one "hybrid" individual which comprises approximately one Gigabit of information. Although this quantity of data sounds small, the Post Genome challenge which will enable the exploitation of this information for example in developing new medical treatments, will require extensive use of bioinformatics (the application of comupational science to Biology) and will generate vast volumes of derived information. Modern environmental sciences, generating data about the entire planet?s climate system and the complex interactions between the sub-systems ? the atmosphere, the ocean, the biosphere. This will produce data on a scale comparable to the Large Hadron collider. In all three fields, scientists will require integrated computing power and communications networks that are many times more powerful than the super-computers of today. Networks that allow thousands of scientists to add to giant global data bases - and tens of thousands of scientists around the world to access and use the data in real time. Applications that make it possible for global scientific teams to carry out huge computer modelling studies ? in silico science. Already, IBM?s ASCI programme is intended to move super-computing from teraflop to petaflop scale in about five years. In other words, a thousand times more powerful than today?s most powerful supercomputer. The next stage will be the development of a massively powerful information utility ? pervasive services that scientists will take for granted. Once again, you are leading the way here in the USA. But we believe that our strengths in science and in the application of that research in wireless and fibre optics will enable the UK to leverage industrial as well as scientific advantages from this next leap forward. By investing in the Scientific Grand Challenges which drive forward innovation, in infrastructure which enables E-science, and in research which will underpin the next generation of internet technologies, this Government is demonstrating its commitment to usher in the new Information Age. Conclusion Mr Chairman, I referred earlier to the close links between England and New England. In the new economy, companies compete ? but they also collaborate. Co-opetition is true of governments and universities as well as business. We compete with each other for mobile capital and mobile people. But we co-operate to solve common problems. I believe that we in the UK have some real competitive advantages. But we also have much to learn. And so it is in that spirit of co-opetition that I look forward to the rest of our discussion this afternoon. |
|
|
|
|
Other speeches by The Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitt
(the following are available from the archive) |
|
