Participated in the 1st 2005 APEC Senior Officials' Meeting

The 1st APEC Senior Officials' Meeting (SOM), a preparatory discussion for the upcoming APEC Summit in Pusan this November was held from 3 to 4 March at Shilla Hotel in Seoul. Chung In-uk, Vice President of KISDI (Vice Chair of APEC TEL) and Seo Bo-hyun, head of APII attended the meeting and participated in the discussion on ICT-related major issues.

The meeting under the presidency of SOM Chair, Ambassador Kim Jong-hoon touched on general issues such as the goal of free and open trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region that APEC had agreed to achieve by 2010 for industrialized economies and by 2020 for developing economies. In addition, participants discussed ways to strengthen APEC cooperation to help victims of the earthquake and tsunami disaster that hit South East Asia at the end of last year and take effective countermeasures against a possible disaster.

In particular, the SOM urged TEL WG, TWG, and SME to step up their effort to respond to the disaster and support the reconstruction process.

In terms of the ICT sector, the SOM agreed that Korea as a chair country would deliver the APEC message in WSIS scheduled to be held in Tunisia this November and thus asked TEL to work on a draft of the message.

TEL was also assigned to develop a strategy to meet the Brunei goal of tripling the number of people with Internet access in the APEC region by 2005 and to cope with emerging threats from the Internet such as spam and virus. Furthermore, the U.S. proposal to prevent illegal copies on the Internet and protect intellectual property rights and the issue of extending the term of ECSG chairman by two years were discussed. And the new leadership (chairman from Mexico, vice chairman from Canada, China, Republic of Korea and the United States) was approved.