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[FYI] Robert Cailliau: Internet-Fuehrerscheinpflicht?




------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Sat, 27 Nov 1999 12:49:48 -0500
From:           	Barry Steinhardt <Barrys@aclu.org>
Subject:        	FC: Web coinventor says no access to Net w/out government
 	"license"
To:             	gilc-plan@gilc.org
Send reply to:  	gilc-plan@gilc.org

[Sounds like Robert Cailliau and Louis Freeh have a lot in common.]


http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991127/wr/tech_web_1.html

Saturday November 27 3:04 AM ET

  Web Co-Inventor Backs Licensing

  By Stephanie Nebehay

  GENEVA (Reuters) - The co-inventor of the World Wide Web says all
  Internet
users should be licensed so surfers
  on the information highway are as accountable as drivers on the
  road.

  Robert Cailliau, who designed the Web with Briton Tim Berners-Lee in
  late
1990, says regulation of the Internet
  would also help trace illegal child pornography and racist sites.

  But in an interview with Reuters Television, the Belgian software
scientist was adamant that the system must remain
  open and neutral -- free of heavy-handed rules governing content.

  Cailliau also said he expected a ``micropayment system'' to be
  agreed
eventually by the international industry
  consortium, known as W3C, which sets standards for the Web.

  This would give Web users the option of paying a small fee in return
  for
downloading advertising-free pages quickly
  from an uncluttered cyberspace, according to the 52-year-old expert.

  Cailliau proposes licensing all Internet users to make them aware of
  their
``duties as well as their rights,'' comparing it
  to a driver needing a license before hitting the road.

  ``The Net is another world, potentially a dangerous place. You can
  harm
people and you can get harmed, just like on
  the road,'' he said. ``If you go through an education process before
getting an account then you're better prepared to
  go out there.''

  He added: ``We all accept that a car has number plates and a driver
  is
registered somewhere...Why can't we apply
  these same principles to the Internet?''

  Offensive Sites

  Asked how offensive sites and ``spam-mail'' invading cyberspace
  should be
dealt with, he replied:

  ``The Internet and the Web are completely outside geographical state
boundaries. This is not dissimilar to air. If you
  make pollution in one place it travels across the frontiers.

  ``For very similar reasons I think we need some regulation of Net
  behavior
which is internationally agreed, globally
  agreed.''

  But the system is open, neutral and non-proprietary, and must remain
  so,
according to Cailliau. ``One has to be
  extremely careful what it is that one regulates. We should not
  regulate
the content but the behavior of people.

  ``We don't tell the servers what they are allowed or not allowed to
  show.
We just register them,'' he added. ``If they
  put child pornography on there, we can at least get at them.''

  Cailliau spoke in his tiny office at the European Laboratory for
  Particle
Physics, known by its French acronym
  CERN. More than 7,000 physicists and staff from 83 countries work at
  the
sprawling site, the world's largest
  research facility.

  It was at the Geneva complex straddling the Swiss-French border that
  he
was part of a small visionary team who
  invented a system allowing documents to be transferred across the
  Internet.

  Cailliau, currently head of Web communications at CERN, reminisced
  about
the breakthrough nearly a decade ago
  -- a time when the Internet was used mainly at academic institutes.

  ``In our own international environment at CERN where we have users
  all
over the world, we needed a system where
  we could communicate documents automatically so that people in any
  time
zone could look at things here without
  needing to contact the person and they could do it by just clicking
around,'' he said.

  Single Namespace

  ``What was really the click that made it all go was this idea of
  giving a
single namespace, designing a single way of
  naming a document wherever it was,'' he said.

  Cailliau hopes the World Wide Web Consortium, directed by
  Berners-Lee,
will agree on a micropayment system to
  reduce the need for advertising. But technical problems must be
  overcome.

  The consortium is run jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, French National Institute for Research in
  Computer Science and Control (INRIA, based near Versailles) and Keio
University in Japan. Its 370 members
  include such industry giants as Apple, IBM, Netscape, Sony, Xerox
  and
Microsoft.

  A working group is studying the idea of an optional fee, according
  to
Cailliau. ``The consortium is very close now to
  making a micropayments recommendation. There is a proposal there,
  which is
very interesting because if we can get
  it to work, that will change the quality of the Web completely.''

  ``We've had micropayments in the French Minitel system for 15 years
  and it
is shown to work extremely well,'' he
  added.

  As for the Web of the future, he said: ``The obvious things are more
speed, more high-quality information, getting
  micropayments to really work and getting the regulation going
internationally as well.

  ``But what is after that is unclear. One must not forget that
  according to
some estimates we've got something like
  three percent of what one could put on the Web and do with it on it
  right
now. So there's still a lot of work to be
  done,'' he said.





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Barry Steinhardt
Associate Director
American Civil Liberties Union
125 Broad St
NY,NY 10004
212 549 2508 (v)
Barrys@aclu.org


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