What these folks do not grasp is that lack of control is the whole point of the Web. It was designed from the ground up to be a self-organizing, permissive system. A central feature of its architecture is that there would be no "owner," no gatekeeper. If your network's computers spoke the agreed technical lingo, you could hook up to the Internet, with no questions asked.
In other words, lack of control is not -- as Iran, China and a host of other repressive UN members think -- a bug; it's a feature.
And it's what has enabled the explosive, disruptive growth that has made it such a transformative force in the world. In these circumstances, entrusting responsibility for the Internet to an organization such as the UN would be as irresponsible as giving a clock to a monkey.
The other high point of the Tunis summit was Negroponte's US$100 laptop. For years the MIT professor has nursed the idea that many of the world's problems would be solved if every child could have his or her own laptop. For the past year his team have been beavering away, designing a wind-up machine that would cost no more than a hundred bucks.
Last month, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan unveiled the prototype -- a small green machine with a yellow crank which looked vaguely like an accessory from a Shrek movie. The apparent absence of any coherent idea of what children would do with a laptop was worrying, but overall it's a terrific, bold idea, and I wish it well, not just because it promises to commoditize laptop technology, but also because it runs on Linux. Could this be the first time in history that something useful has emerged from WSIS?
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