Subject: Eating the canned from the new information society

From: [email-masked] (Dan Kolis)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 18:19:32 -0500

I was curious enough to read the contents of this URL, (about the U.N. about
to meet to do something or another with "the information society"):
  http://www.itu.int/wsis

Site barely moves. We have good bandwidth and its 400 bit/S, says my browser.

So, for fun, I tried:
  http://www.alpo.com/

Which loads instantly. The make dog food.

Working assumption: When the self annointed intelligentsia about to make all
these unrequested experiments with Internet can achieve the real world
performance of a dog food company, they will have made "progress".

Do you think there is going to be even *one* delegate, even *one*, who
decides they should just leave things alone?

Regards,
Dan

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From: jfcm <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 11:41:35 +0100

>Site barely moves. We have good bandwidth and its 400 bit/S, says my browser.

may be are there more people accessing world submit sites than dogs food 
sites?

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From: Nathaniel Borenstein <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 14:39:24 -0500

> performance of a dog food company, they will have made "progress".

Working assumption:  Technology doesn't automatically trump 
*everything*.

It is true that there are a lot of clueless people at WSIS.  There are 
also quite a few very well-informed people whose only concern is 
maximizing corporate profits.  There are even a few people (c.f. 
http://www.cpsr.org) trying to stand up for things like universal 
access and against increased censorship and monitoring.

While I agree that it is unlikely in the extreme that anything said or 
done in Geneva this week will affect the functioning of the Internet at 
the level where the IETF usually operates, that does not mean the 
conference is irrelevant.  International norms and laws on many topics 
of vital concern to the Internet community -- including all the issues 
of intellectual property issues, security, privacy, spam, etc. -- will 
not be set overnight, but WSIS and its follow-ons may well serve as the 
venue for many of these discussions.  It's very easy to make fun of a 
bunch of UN bureaucrats trying to "control" the Internet, but it's 
naive to think that's all that's going on here.  -- Nathaniel