Changes Require New Thinking

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said Wednesday that given the dramatic changes that the Internet has undergone in the 10 years since the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development first released its e-commerce guidelines, government officials must re-evaluate how they think about policymaking. He spoke at an OECD conference at the FTC on consumer protection in the digital age which is the start of a process launched by the OECD to update the organization's 1999 guidelines to reflect the dramatic technological changes that have occurred in the last decade. In describing some of the changes in the last decade, Sec Locke noted that Google didn't begin providing keyword-based ads until 2000, now "hundreds of thousands of advertisers use Google's AdWords." He added that in 1999 only one company offered a "dedicated" Web service for cell phones, while in 2008 more than 160 million Internet-connected smart phones were sold.