The discussion was on two things: Vista, tying in “trusted computing”, and Internet governance – and on it were host Gareth Mitchell (a lovely bloke I met in Tunisia at the World Summit), woolly mammoth and terrific IT journo Bill Thompson, the unnervingly smart John Palfrey from Berkman/Harvard, and the Iranian blogger bloke who name I have forgotten and just looked up – Hossein Derekhshan – and, well, me.

To make matters worse, the producer Colin Grant, called me up and we were discussing what I thought about Vista and Net governance and I said I’d get hold of a copy of Vista before the programme. This I failed to do because Microsoft for some peculiar reason had refused to hand them out until – well, until about now, early Jan.

So I reviewed the presentations out there and read Guy Kewney’s bit about it (Guy always somehow gets there first) *but* I failed to tell Colin this, so once the programme started recording, Gareth kept leading me in with “well, Kieren McCarthy has been trying out Vista…”

I considered saying I hadn’t but then decided not to as I was sure the same points could be made, although I wish I had been able to give an image of the OS in people’s minds. Having listened to it, it doesn’t sound as vague as it felt at the time, although I do have to work on speaking more clearly and coherently. Bill Thompson, who has vastly more experience at radio and TV than I, has a much clearer, more distinct way of summarising.

Anyway, I think it’s quite a good programme. My parts are definitely the weakest, and unfortunately my comments on Net governance were cut out for time, and they left John Palfrey’s material in there – which was absolutely the right editing choice.

It was interesting to have the chat expecially since I was in Oxford, Gavin and Bill in London, John on the East coast of the US and Hossein in Madrid (although for complex reasons that I have forgotten we pretended he was in Canada). It’s a shame we weren’t all in one room, we’d probably come up with something really useful.

Anyway, here be the MP3.

In a press conference a few hours later, chairman Vint Cerf urged the reporters to read the transcript of the discussion. That transcript isn’t up yet but I figured that Cerf was right about listening to it, so I have knocked up an MP3 of the 45-minute discussion and posted it below.

The most contentious issues were that the registries would be able to raise their prices, and charge different amounts for different domains (google.info is worth a little more than sausagemaker.info ); that the new contracts came with a “presumptive right” to renew the contract when it reached its end; and that the registries were able to use and sell the data of individual registrants however they want.

After a lot of argument what happened was: a cap of 10 percent a year was put on domain increases; all domains have to treated alike; the presumptive renewal is there unless there is a “breach” of the contract; the companies can sell the data how they see fit.

The contracts are bad and stupid but they had to go through because of the bad and stupid dotnet and dotcom contracts that VeriSign manage to extract from ICANN. I went on and on about how vital the dotnet contract was, and on and on and on and on and on about how ICANN had provably fixed the process to give it to VeriSign and now it has come back to haunt ICANN now and into the future.

Twomey claimed that these contracts won’t necessarily impact the new gTLD contracts i.e. all the dreadful parts will be pulled out. But this is classic Twomey stonewalling. ICANN has just written in monopoly top-level domains – you get it once, you have it forever – but insisting on a “breach” of contract, putting ICANN into a hopeless regulator role it is ill-equipped to carry out.

It has also created an oligopoly by telling the registries they can increase prices by 10 percent a year when the actual cost of domains is going down. ICANN has set the lines by which the market will run i.e. Internet domain names will become more expensive over time. It is in fact undermining, yet again, its fundamental brief to increase competition on the Internet.

And all because of the desperate need to carry through the secret deal made with VeriSign to end its lawsuits with ICANN. ICANN gave it dotnet and dotcom, and VeriSign promised to buckle under – but then VeriSign screwed ICANN yet again right at the end when it managed to get the US government to award itself dotcom renewal rights.

Twomey’s inherent desire to strike under-the-table deals has screwed ICANN here. He would have done better to get on the Net community’s side and rally against VeriSign. But then hindsight is a wonderful thing. The lesson if anyone really needs to be reminded of it yet again is: don’t do deals with VeriSign. You will come out worse off.

Anyway, here is the ICANN Board’s discussion about the biz/org/info contract extensions. Only Susan Crawford really discussed the reason why these contracts were agreed to. I don’t find that entirely encouraging. In fact, I’m not sure that half the Board even understood what the issue with the dotnet contract was.

MP3 of ICANN Board discussions over biz/info/org contracts.

Both of them made mention of my paella (I note with sadness that only one was interested in the actual recipe however). Now this was a tremendous paella, there’s no doubt about that, but I suspect that there may be a few people out there that don’t want to know about my lunch and so I am going to highlight here an easy solution to the problem: separate RSS feeds.

I have the blog set up so that you can grab individual automated RSS feeds and so avoid having every post appear if you subscribe. I will stick the links below so at least people have an option. Of course, if you want to continue to know a little too much about my life, feel free to stick with the main RSS feed. I don’t mind in the slightest.

• Main blog feed
• Internet feed (includes all ICANN, IGF and Nominet stories)
• ICANN feed
• IGF feed
• Nominet feed
• iPod feed
• Journalism feed
• Oxford feed
• Photos feed
• Podcast feed
• Sex.com feed
• Technology feed
• WSIS feed

You can subscribe to as many or as few as you like.

I have grabbed the audio from the meeting and produced a series of MP3 files which you can download and listen to here. I will also post them on the IGF200.info blog. All files below:

• Opening Panel: Emily Taylor (Nominet), Alun Michael MP, Nitin Desai
  MP3 file (22 mins)
  
  

• Security Panel: Jean-Jaques Sahel (DTi), Mark Sunner (Messagelabs), Dave Evans (Information Commissioners Office), Guy Hosein (Privacy International/LSE), Richard Allan (Cisco)
  MP3 file (35 mins)
  
  

• Child Abuse Panel: Peter Robbins (Internet Watch Foundation), John Carr (NCH), Camille de Stempel (AOL/ISPA)
  MP3 file (22 mins)

• Openness Panel: Andrew McLaughlin (Google), Dr Yaman Akdeniz (Cyberliberties UK), Prof Jonathan Zittrain (OII/Berkman)
  MP3 file (34 mins)
  
  

• Emerging Issues Panel: Howard Williams (Worldbank), David Harrington (Communications Management Association), Malcolm Hutty (LINX), Chinyelu Onwurah (Ofcom)
  MP3 file (42 mins)
  
  

• Closing remarks by Nitin Desai
  MP3 file (10 mins)
  
  

I have also done a file combining just Nitin Desai’s opening and closing remarks, which you can grab here (mp3, 20 mins).

I should add that I was hoping to post videos of each sessions but have been thwarted by the combination of video formats and video editing software. I have a (very large) grab of the whole event in .asf format but have given up on editing after wasting hours trying to get it into a more usable format and only ending up with out-of-sync pics and audio.

Hopefully Nominet will ask the webcast company to do the split and post them in .avi or .mpeg files. The pictures are not that important anyway and are huge files so the MP3s are more useful and shareable.

Last week, Nominet announced that there were six candidates and released a statement from each. Despite the extremely tight time period (for example postal votes have to be with Nominet tomorrow (Monday)), I thought it would be a good idea to do very brief interviews with each candidate asking what I hope are the questions that Nominet members would wish to ask and then post them on the Net to help people arrive at a decision.

So far I have done and edited four of the six, and I have just received an email from Lord Erroll so will hopefully talk to him this evening and post his tonight [Update 8.30pm: Done and now up]. I have yet to hear from Andrew Bennett which is a shame, but if he wants to get in contact and get his points across, there is still time [Another update 12pm: Andrew got in touch and his interview is now also up].

You can read each candidate’s statement here [pdf], but below are MP3s of the interviews. They are slightly different in length but average at around four minutes, and I don’t believe I have given anyone an advantage one way or another, although I may have been a little more aggressive with Fay Howard due to tiredness.

Also during Angus Hanton’s interview either myself or he was called by someone else so there is “call waiting” blip at various points (just in case you were wondering). And Fay Howard was on her mobile so the very beginning is slightly garbled.

In alphabetical order:

• Andrew Bennett (mp3)

• Gordon Dick (mp3)

• Lord Erroll (mp3)

• Peter Gradwell (mp3)

• Angus Hanton (mp3)

• Fay Howard (mp3)

If anyone has any problems getting or listening to these files, please leave a comment below or email me.

Update: Yes, the MP3 player has started playing at odd speeds again. It must be the recorded bitrate, or maybe the fact it’s a variable bitrate. Anyway the files themselves work fine, so click on the MP3 link to listen while I try to sort out the problem.

Second update: No, I’ve wasted 40 minutes on it, so I’ll kill the Flash player until I can get it working without mishap.

Commerce assistant secretary John [tag]Kneuer[/tag] – the man that matters – was asked straight out whether the US was prepared to transition its role, especially considering the famous “principles” announced last year. (The key sentence being: “As such, the United States is committed to taking no action that would have the potential to adversely impact the effective and efficient operation of the DNS and will therefore maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file”.)

This was his response.

“I think the fact that we are gathered here today and we are entering this process is a clear indication that we are committed to this transition.

“I think that there has been a lot of reading into that statement very, very expansively. The historic role that we announced that we were going to preserve is fairly clearly articulated in that statement – it is the technical verification and authorisation of changes to the authoritative root. That is a function of IANA that is limited, extraordinarily technical in nature, and very explicitly tied to security and stability from a technical standpoint.

“That should not be read so expansively so as to say that we are going to retain all of our historic roles. We clearly have an incentive and long-standing policy to complete this transition and that our oversight role of ICANN should transition away.

“That being said, we will take no actions that will call in question the security and stability of the Internet. And in that context we have announced our intention to retain this function under which I think is distinct.”

Listen to it here.

Or here (I am having strange problems with the playback speed though):

I read this statement as the US government recognising that it has to hand over its current role. Thank god for that. But it remains determined to cut a deal where it retains final control over the root zone file (aka the IANA function).

That’s the negotiating position. The US government will step away from everything else but it wants final say over IANA. Will this scale-back work? Only time will tell.

It was interesting for a number of reasons not least of which was the fact that he appears to have lied about having seen a [tag]BBC[/tag] investigation which alleges that the detective in charge of the [tag]Stephen Lawrence[/tag] murder investigation was paid off by the father of one of the accused.

Stephen Lawrence was an 18-year-old black A-level student who was stabbed to death by five white youths in Eltham, south-east London in 1993. The case became famous because of the appalling way in which the Metropolitan Police dealt with the investigation. The case against five youths – one of which was the son of a notorious local gangster – fell through and led to an inquiry.

That inquiry found that no one officer was to blame but did conclude that the Met was “institutionally racist” and prompted a huge review of the organisation.

Now, as well as finding a significant flaw in the alibi of one of the alleged attackers, the BBC has former drugs squad officer Neil Putman confessing that the original investigating officer, Detective Sergeant John Davidson, was being paid off by Clifford Norris, the father of one of the suspects.

The BBC programme has been trailed heavily in the press today obviously in order to make as many people as possible aware of the programme before “The Boys Who Killed Stephen Lawrence” is shown tonight at 9pm on BBC1.

However, when asked about the allegations in the programme during his radio interview, Home Secretary John Reid said: “I did actually see that last night and I don’t watch much television but as it happened last night after I had done my third statement to Parliament I watched a bit and saw it and found it, er, disturbing.”

The clear implcation is that John Reid believes the programme was on last night – a fair assumption considering the press coverage today – and thereby *lied* about having seen it.

The only other possibility is that the Home Office had a tape of the programme and it was that John Reid saw last night. That, no doubt, will be the Home Office’s explanation, but listen again. It is very clear at least to this listener that Mr Reid is under the mistaken impression that he watched a bit of the programme last night on the television.

The question if Mr Reid did tell a porkie is: should the Home Secretary of the UK really be lying about watching a programme about hugely significant corruption and racism with the Metropolitan police force? And if he is prepared to lie in such an off-the-cuff manner, how can we believe anything he ever says in future?

Listen to the clip here. Or the full recording on the BBC Today site here . [RealPlayer].

So I changed my route home to go via the Playhouse and buy a ticket. I bought it and turned up at 5pm to see what one of the world’s top scientists had to say about the Internet, and why he thought the Enlightenment – by which I correctly assumed he meant the nature of religion-free search for truths – was under threat.

If you are thinking, I’ve never heard of the Simonyi lectures, you’re in good company, nor had I. A very quick explanation: [tag]Charles Simonyi[/tag] was a very early recruit to Microsoft, he basically designed Word and Excel and was the company chief software architect for a few years. As a result, he is a very, very rich man. He was also in the audience. Mr Simonyi gave some huge sum of money to Oxford University in 1995 to cover a new position – a Chair for the Public Understanding of Science.

The chair since then and still now is [tag]Richard Dawkins[/tag], who wrote the Selfish Gene back in the 1970s and it basically the foremost evolution expert in the world. Partly as a result he is possibly the most famous atheist we have on the planet at the moment. He was also there.

In 1999, Dawkins set up an annual lecture, given in Oxford. There’s been a wide range of speakers over the years from a science philospher to an astronomer, an ecologist, a neuropsychologist and so on.

This year it was the turn of Sir Harry Kroto – who, I have to confess I have never heard of either. He is a chemist and won the Nobel Prize in 1996 for discovering a new formation of carbon, commonly called “Buckyballs”. Right, so that’s the background.

I was surprised to find how many pepole turned up to the lecture, especially considering it was on a Friday at 5pm and cost £3.50. It struck me that there were alot of very bright people there – one of the wonderful things about Oxford. I also noticed that Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman was in the foyer. I’m sure I should have recognised many more people but I didn’t.

I also recorded the lecture in order to post it here for resource purposes – for some strange reason Dawkins doesn’t do this, I’m at a loss why not – just stick a mini-disc recorder on the PA system and upload it as an MP3.

Sadly, I don’t think the MP3 will be of much use because of Harry Kroto’s strange lecture style. Everything he said went up on a large screen – his script. He also read extensively from quotes, which was clear from looking at the screen, but if you are just listening it will be very confusing. I have to say as well that even if I had filmed the lecture, it would still have been difficult to follow.

Listen to Richard Dawkins’ intro [download here]

Listen to Harry Kroto’s lecture [download here]

Listen to questions to Kroto after the lecture [download here]

My first thought as the lecture began and Harry Kroto leapt about following his own internal connecting logic was that the lecture was going to be incredible – a fast-paced, highly intelligent launch into a genius’ mind. Then when the leaps became too continuous, I thought it was going to end up almost incomprehensible, only making sense to people that followed Sir Harry’s own thought processes. In the end though I ended up disappointed with what I felt was an overall lack of clarity and coherence. It was very much like the experience everyone has when they first get onto the Internet – amazed at the sheer quantity of information, you find yourself clicking on links, leaping off on tangents and eventually find yourself, three hours later, completely incapable of remembering a single thing you had read.

So why am I bothering to blog about the lecture if I found it so disappointing?

Because, discussing it afterwards, I discovered that the style of the lecture had, almost by accident, caused my brain to run off in all sorts of interesting directions it never had before. By far in a way the most significant thought, for me anyway, was that despite the lecture’s title and despite Harry Kroto clearly being extremely intelligent, he seemed to have a very basic grasp of the Internet.

So, incredibly, did Richard Dawkins. They both spoke of the Internet in the kind of almost naive awe and wonder that demonstrates that people are very far behind was is now possible with the Net. I’m not criticising them, both of them are no doubt several orders of magnitude more intelligent that I am – but I felt inspired to do something that would enable these people to grasp the Net. And inspired to try to get them using the tools that they can then put to great use.

Sir Harry has already started making use of the Net. He is part of an interesting site called The Vega Science Trust, found at http://www.vega.org.uk, where, among other things, there are a series of interviews with Nobel-prize winning scientists, clips from which Sir Harry played during the lecture.

But the amazement with which he spoke of blogs and how there was actually some intelligent debate going on there was surprising to me. I really thought that scientists of all people would be more conversant with the Net.

It also worried me that no one in the lecture hall appeared to understand how the Internet was governed. I know I’m unusual in that this has become my speciality, but for people to have no idea of how this Net things works – especially at a time when very big, very fundamental decisions are being made about how the Net will function in the future – is deeply troubling to me. I am going to have to devise ways, very, very soon to get people to learn about and understand how important it is that the Net structures are set up correctly.

The worrying rise of dogma

Sir Harry’s basic lecture thread was that there is a worrying rise in religious dogma that is seeking to control societies – to the detriment of the wonderful science-based realities and truths that we have been building over the past 200 years. I happen to agree with his concerns, even though Jeremy Paxman accused him of being “paranoid” in questions at the end. The answer to this creeping cancer lies in the Internet, Sir Harry argued, since it will allow for the larger silent majority to organise and share information.

Where he really failed however was in providing a method or philosophy by which rational thinking can be used to defeat the emotive religious arguments that strike a chord with something deep inside many people. If he want to give a big lecture on the topic, I wanted something to rally around. He offered nothing.

But this did have the peculiar impact on me of causing me to try to think of ways of doing things that enable rationality and intelligence to defeat the forces of fear and control. I realised I am in a position to do two things. One, I can seek at every opportunity to educate people about how the Internet works and is working. Only if the foundation is solid can the buildings built on top of it ever hope to survive a future onslaught. Tied in with this, I think I may have to be a little more polemical in my Internet journalism so that people are at least considering the bigger, wider topics while stuck in the day-to-day political battles.

The second thing is – and I have to give it more thought as to how exactly to do it – I have a brilliant plan for self-regulation of content on the Internet. The scariest element of what Sir Harry senses is a betrayal of the Enlightenment, at least from my perspective as a journalist, is the increasingly aggressive, utterly biased and often knowingly inaccurate press outlets. The epitome is, of course, Fox News in the US. But, as the media senses that it no longer has control of basic facts (they leak out too fast and too easily thanks to the Internet) they are increasingly fighting off the competition by appealing to people’s prejudices, and, in some cases, by giving favourable reviews of powerful figures in order to get access to exclusive information.

Grand idea

I have started thinking about and devising a method by which inaccurate information on the Net can be flagged up for the normal user, thereby providing an impetus for people to be accurate and responsive. A trusted source would end up with more visitors. That may sound naive but that was also the accusation levelled at Wikipedia amid claims that it would never work. The truth is if you give people the power, they will defeat any attempts at control by sheer numbers.

Imagine visiting a news website for the first time and it automatically being flagged red, meaning proven, consistent and even methodical inaccuracy and bias. You will look elsewhere. If such a rating system could be built, it would then be pulled into search engines – so long as it was easily, readily and freely accessible. So then when you search for news, the news story with the highest accuracy rating comes top of listings. Suddenly you enter a world where accuracy becomes financially viable, even desirable. Now *that* would be a revolution.

I have some pictures and some notes about the meeting that I will stick up when I have a minute, but first of all, here are MP3s of each person’s speech, in the order they were given. Click on the person’s name below for the audio file. Most are around 2MB in size, so depending on the speed of your connection, it may take a short while to start playing. Or, alternatively, right-click and Save Link As to your computer.

Please note that the sound on the first person – Laurie Pycroft – is bad because firstly the PA system was playing up and secondly because he was by far in a way the furthest from the microphone, which was stuck in the middle of the table next to the meeting chairman.

If you want to hear the medical realities of animal testing, then listen to Professor Andrew McMichael. If you want to listen to Oxford University’s perspective, listen to Dr Ken Fleming. If you want to hear an impassioned personal plea, listen to Niki Shisler. And if you are interested in the wider political issue, listen to Evan Harris.

I should add as well that Evan Harris held a debate a lunchtime today in Westminster Hall about animal testing in which he suggested that pill bottles have the fact they are tested on animals printed on them, that department of health press releases feature whether drugs have been tested on animals, and that the Health Secretary should speak publicly in favour of animal testing. You can read more about it on Evan Harris’ website here.

Here are the MP3s of the Pro-Test meeting:

1. Laurie Pycroft: 16-year-old founder of Pro-Test
   
2. Professor Andrew McMichael: Director of the MRC Human Immunology Unit, Oxford University
   
3. Dr Ken Fleming: Head of Medical Science Division, University of Oxford
   
4. Niki Shishler: Best-selling author of Fragile, journalist and mother of a profoundly disabled child
   
5. Vicky Cowell: Director, Patients’ Voice of Medical Advance
   
6. Christopher Bickerton: Organising member of Pro-Test
   
7. Dr Evan Harris MP: LibDem Science spokesman and MP for Oxford West
   

Notes later.

In the next few days, the dates of the first inaugural Internet Governance Forum in Athens will be announced. It will be either late October of middle of November. In the next 10 days, all interested parties have been asked to send their own view of how the “preparation committee” for that meeting should be formed.

The Secretariat – mostly Markus Kummer – will then decide how the meeting will be structured and the new preparation committee will decide what topics are to be covered in Athens.

That aside, I had a brief interview with the chairman, and the man chosen by Kofi Annan, to get the IGF to its first meeting, Nitin Desai. In it, he spoke of how he saw the discussions progressing, what the Forum would end up reviewing and what it’s real value may prove to be.

I have put it here as an MP3 podcast [mp3]. It’s just over 10 minutes in length. I think it neatly captures the entire two-day conference and, crucially, looks forward to what we can expect from the IGF proper.