IP: A bit more on "Penn professor fears modest start-ups could suffer on the Net "

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

In the article the writer said:

"He said he was concerned that the "richness and variety" of the Internet be
preserved and that the government not begin regulating the Net."

I wanted to elaborate and correct some of it. I did not say that regulation 
was never needed. I do not encourage the regulation of the Internet. The 
regulatory process is slow and very subject to steerage that can be 
disadvantageous to small firms. The slowness often would mean that 
regulations would be approved after an infinity in Internet 
time.  Technology and the business  change much too rapidly for the 
existing regulatory processes to work. How to accelerate that process is an 
interesting exercise that must include the Congress, courts etc.,

But more important what I said in the talk and have often said is that the 
best path is to let the community, which includes industry, organizations 
and people to try to do things on their own. The role of the government is 
to apply adult supervision if the self regulations fail or end up against 
the public interest. This "adult supervision" notion was translated into 
Japanese by Nikki in an article of my appointment to the CT at the FCC and 
then back to English as

"The golden sword of ultimate recourse"

sounds like a very good description of the role of government.

Dave