Gordon tells Google 'openness is good'

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Gordon Brown said that Britain had created the opportunities for the mobile phone market and the broadband market to develop as he told a Google conference that a global economy had to be open and flexible.

Speaking at the Google Zeitgeist Conference in Hertfordshire, he noted the importance of openness to help make a global economy function.

He said: "The global economy will not work for people unless it is open, flexible, about free-trade, non-protectionist, inclusive, empowering and about building a society.

"The issue is not between change and no change but helping people to cope with change."

Mr Brown, who launched a YouTube channel on which people could send him video questions, also welcomed a collaboration between Google Maps and the Met Office to create online maps of climate change.

He added that he was confident the UK had helped create the conditions necessary for open communications.

"The only way the internet and the new technology can work is if there is openness and if we are not protectionist. And I like to think that in Britain we have created the opportunities for the mobile phone market to develop, for the broadband market to develop, that we have pioneered the release of audio visual spectrum, we are moving in on the broadband and trying to make it more available to people, and we have got a light touch regulatory system," he said.
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