Daniel,
thanks for your comments. What I would be most interested in however would be your comment on the one statement in that particular message which you did not comment on:
Fish that live to an old age have learned long ago to avoid the easy bait - there's usually a hook behind it. ;-)
None of this is *any* reason for those with particular interests to succeed in establishing Internet regulation or even rushed legislation anywhere. THIS IS THE REAL DANGER!
Is the ITU currently viewing the Internet as something they should regulate? If so, why? If not, why not? ;-)
No, the ITU does not view the Internet as something that should be regulated. (unless you're using the word "regulate" in the sense of encouraging "deregulation") which is what the folks like us and the Commission have been trying to do. While it may be fun to deride folks in DG XIII as clueless bureaucrats, in fact they are strangely your allies because they're trying to force open competition in Europe which drives down ridiculous leased line prices, etc. This is a tremendous enabling factor for the Net. That's a contributing factor to why Internet penetration in Finland is almost twice that of the US. Despite populist belief, the Internet doesn't exist in some vacuum - it's layered on top of the public telecommunications infrastructure which is a giant industry under tremendous transformation. It hasn't been lost on too many people of the correlation between lack of "top-down" involvement in the "Net" and its success. However, to quote Peter Ustinov: "Revolutions have never succeeded until the establishment does three-quarters of the work". And this will also hold true for the Internet, one of the great revolutions of this century. The embracement of the Net by a mainstream 'establishment' has assured its success. But this establishment includes many new stakeholders in a several hundred-billion dollar global communications industry of consumers, mega-corporations, Internet service providers, telcos, equipment manufacturers, the legal profession, broadcasters, content providers, governments, regulatory bodies and many others. Over the next few years, you will find the core Internet 'community' values increasingly at odds with the values of other communities (and there are many other communities in the new Internet establishment). This is an inescapable consequence of the strategic and commercial importance of the Net for global trade and commerce. The current problem issues with DNS are only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Imagine the problems that will come up when IP telephony takes off or when you've got to do interexchange settlements for RSVP. Then we'll be having big-time fun. I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that it behooves the 'Internet technical community' to recognize potential allies and not immediately assume that everyone is a "foe" to their cause. In this aspect, the technical community can often be their own worst enemy. If you want to maintain your Net culture and ethics in an adversarial world, it seems to me that you've got to try and educate others why they are important. </off soapbox> Cheers, Bob