IP: Web coinventor says no access to Net w/out government "license"

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date: Sat, 27 Nov 1999 12:35:25 -0500
> To: politech () vorlon mit edu
> From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
>
>
> [Sounds like Robert Cailliau and Louis Freeh have a lot in common.]

[ not only that but he sounds a lot worse. I wonder if the W3C actually 
endorses the concept of micropayments.  and licensing.  Sad!!! Dave]


> 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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