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Mr. Battle: I did not have the opportunity, because I wished to curtail my remarks, to mention the ministerial conference in Bonn earlier this week. It involved not only the EU but the Americans, Japanese, Canadians and Australians. A declaration was published at the end of that conference, which will be available in the Library. Some tensions between America and Europe were perhaps exaggerated by the media, but some of the themes outlined in my speech, including confidentiality and a clear legal framework, were raised at the conference. It took the debate helpfully forward. Those matters need to be dealt with further in the Council of Ministers. I hope that the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues will find the declaration helpful in taking the debate forward. We need to keep the debate moving.
Mr. Taylor: I shall certainly look at the declaration with great interest, but I predict that one declaration will not resolve the problem.
Another problem is intellectual property regulation. Certain countries in Asia which have enormous potential are held back by their failure to grasp the problem. The failure to safeguard intellectual property causes countries from the more developed world not to invest as much there as they otherwise would. It is a market distortion.
Security is another problem. The Minister touched on the big argument about encryption and whether heavy encryption can be exported from the United States. The battle is much more complex than simply whether encryption should be exported. There is a battle between Governments. I am the Minister's predecessor so I understand the problems that he will face. Governments need from time to time, subject to the laws of the country, to keep an eye on material that might be passed across the digital networks connected with terrorism, drugs or crime in general. Governments must balance their need to do that against the desire for open speech and freedom of communication. That is very much part of the debate in the United States, where only in the past week the Supreme Court has changed the rules on decency, which President Clinton thought he had enshrined in a Bill that had passed through Congress. Those battles will be enjoined and they will touch on some sensitive matters between Governments.
I was delighted that, after pitched battles, we managed to get 1 January 1998 as the date by which the EU will have liberalised telecommunications. There is a danger of former Ministers sounding rather pompous, but I am
trying to flag up the issues of concern. I am profoundly concerned that liberalisation without proper regulation is not liberalisation at all. If one moves a previously market-dominant company into a liberalised background, but does not watch interconnection charges, one is not liberalising. The test of liberalisation is ease of market entry. That will be another international squabble which will grow. In those circumstances--some of my colleagues ought to shut their ears to this--the EU has a profoundly important role to play. Karel van Miert is one of the most important Commissioners, and in some ways I wish he would exercise his powers under the treaty of Rome with even more gusto. There will be a real need for intervention on competition grounds to ensure that market access for our companies in the rest of the EU is open and that access is properly rewarded by their ability to obtain customers and contracts and access to existing networks as well as to build up new ones.
There are other factors to watch. We must ensure that what countries call easy access does not mean that there is no real incentive to invest in the infrastructure in the first place. I will not bore the House any longer on this subject. It is complicated. There must be a regulator and it must not be the department of trade and industry of any particular country. It must be separate. Once the rules are set, they need to be stable.
I take as an example a country that is well away from Europe. India has the most sensational potential in telecommunications and the information society. I shall not go into all the reasons for its failure to realise that potential because they might be libellous. One of the reasons is that the regulatory arrangements were not put in place at the time of the auctions for the telecom circles, so it was difficult for companies to know how much to invest because they were not sure of the framework in which the investment would have, over a long period, to gain a proper rate of return. India missed a trick. Of the 900 million people in India, fewer than 1 per cent. have access to a telephone. That is extraordinary. The potential is phenomenal, but intellectual property law and stable regulation are two of the preconditions for access to the information society. Companies want to help and to invest, but the Indian Government in return must make an effort to remove the worries about those two issues.
I do not believe that all that I have said and all that has been discussed in America recently has fully impacted on those people who prepare papers on foreign policy. I suspect that foreign policy will change. The way in which countries interact with each other will be affected by the opening up of societies, the need for information to be secure and the need for content to be garnered from wherever in the world and then protected. Content is the great driving force of the information society. I commend to the House some of the articles that have begun to appear on the subject. There was one in the spring 1997 edition of Foreign Policy, an American magazine, by Daniel F. Burton, Jr., a vice president of Novell. The article is remarkable not so much for its profundity, although it is interesting, but because it appeared in Foreign Policy. It is headed "The Brave New Wired World". The Americans are realising that information technology will influence the way in which they behave. We in the United Kingdom had better watch out.
The article refers to the power of the United States to play a defining role in how the world economy and politics develop because it has
The point of the article is to show that new relationships will be built on those assumptions. To exert influence and power in the world, it is necessary to have a level of excellence in each of the areas that I have just mentioned. Much will flow from that and it will have a big impact on the debate about how a country maintains its security in the widest sense of the word, bearing in mind the fact that information is one of the greatest assets that it needs to protect.
It is important to consider how a country can protect its wealth, because wealth no longer respects national boundaries. If a country is to be powerful, it must be able to attract and retain businesses, particularly value-added high skills industry. That will impact also on how a country protects its culture. If we are not careful, we will find that other cultures will begin to dominate. That is less of a problem in our eyes perhaps than it might be for the French because of the Anglo-Saxon nature of many of the developments that have taken place. Nevertheless, we must be careful to ensure that we are as active as possible around the world. We should encourage things in which we have a lead. For example, the role of the BBC World Service is important to the way in which we protect our culture. I do not want to encourage the Front Benches to get into a debate with me about that. I am not trying to discuss historic policy decisions, I am merely noting that I believe that the BBC World Service has an important part to play.
It is important for us to be clear about what satellites are going up and what access there will be to them. We should also be clear what role British companies or British-based companies--which is not the same as British-owned ones--will play. What role will we play in international negotiations about access? How do we plan to react to the development of low earth orbit satellites systems such as Iridium? Are British companies playing a part in those operations, such as Teledesic and all the others? They will all have an impact on access to everyone's desktop computer and everyone's mobile telephone.
What indigenous inward investment are we trying to encourage? What about exports, such as the excellent work of Motorola on GSM digital telephones and the work that Nortel has done with Energis on wrap-round optical fibre systems for power lines? As a result of that work, telecommunications can be combined with the power system.
Such questions will determine whether Britain will have a leading role to play in the world rather than the more traditional one on which the House has previously concentrated. If we think that such developments will impact on everything else and leave politics alone, we have another think coming. I took part in a cyber debate during the general election campaign with the producer of
the cyber debate for the National Children's Home. I believe that about only a few people took part or paid any attention to it. That was hardly earth shattering or a way of transforming the outcome of the election. It was a small taste, however, of what will become part of everyday life in the next general election campaign.
In the United States, during the July election campaign, the Republican party in America announced that the press should hold their front pages and take a deep breath because it intended to make a big announcement in the following week. Everyone tried to guess what it might be--it was a remodelled page on its web site, which was done to capture the imagination of the American people. I do not recall that the front page of The Times was held back when the Conservative party remodelled its web site during the general election.
"a towering software presence, a world-class hardware business, a dynamic content industry, a telecommunications sector that is rapidly being deregulated, a strong venture capital base, flexible labor markets, and an unparalleled university system."
The United Kingdom has the same benefits. We share with the Americans the English language. They have modified it slightly as they have developed it, but I am generous enough to say that we share it.
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