Government ministers from 40 countries will meet with technology experts this week to debate the principles that will govern the future of the internet economy.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was due to meet in Seoul with representatives from 15 technical groups plus political and business leaders.

“What the technical community wants to get across to the OECD is the importance of development being continued in an open, collaborative environment. The ministers will be working towards setting a policy framework for the next 10 years, and we are very keen to be engaged with that,” said Bill Graham, head of strategic global engagement at The Internet Society.

The forum will deal with current challenges such as the net neutrality argument and worldwide adoption of IPv6, the next version of the protocol which runs the internet.

The deployment of IPv6 will play an important role in supporting the continued growth of the web, said net pioneer and Google vice president Vint Cerf.

The protocol will solve the problem of the rapidly-diminishing availability of new net connections by supporting an almost limitless number of IP addresses. This could be particularly useful for mobile devices, whose ubiquity will increase demand for internet connections.

“There are already three billion mobile computers in the world, and many of them are
internet-enabled already,” said Cerf.