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".
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