Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to come and take evidence from you. Rather than spend time on an introduction, because I suspect the issues will emerge as we go through, we will go straight into the questions. We note that OECD has done much to establish minimum standards for codes of conduct. The OECD is not an organisation which is involved in the standard-setting business but rather we try to facilitate a favourable environment for the development of electronic commerce which we think is essentially going to be private sector led.
Regulation is minimalist, transparent, stable and so forth but the key to it is effectiveness.
The secretariat also makes recommendations but the former things like the 1980 OECD guidelines for privacy protection, the 1992 guidelines on security of information systems, the 1997 guidelines on cryptography policy and, more recently, the 1999 guidelines on consumer protection for electronic commerce. An example would be privacy where the OECD recommends certain privacy principles. Various member countries have privacy laws and institutions that enforce those laws while other countries, for instance the United States, prefer a self-regulatory approach. The idea of soft law, which is law at a more basic principle level, is to encourage respect for some basic principles and to encourage international coherence. When you come to things like privacy, for example, it should enable trans-border data flow arrangements to come into existence.