a very credible white paper is circulating for the WTO to establish an internet CZAR to regualate the Internet and level the playing field world wide.
personally, the Feds and the FCC are bad enough --now they want to have a **global** bureaucracy play god -???
Depends on what the role of the Czar is. If it is to stop sillyness like border disputes and keep national governments out of the loop then it could be a good thing. If they want to regulate it is a bad thing. WTO is mainly known for the GATT which they brokered. This is basically an agreement amongst national governments to be "hands off" in their tariff regulations. There is the potential for governments to regulate the Internet. It is in everyone's interest to keep hands off but if one starts to regulate then it is in others interests to regulate. The general soulution to prisoners dilema games is to form some type of alliance. It is not possible to form alliances in classical prisoners dilemas since they are restricted to a single dilema at a time. Givernments are involved with multiple dilemas and hence have multiple agreements. The main reason to keeo a treaty is that the credibility of government depends on keeping treaties. Thus a treaty can solve a prisoners dilema problem since the gain from breaking one treaty is more than offset by the potential loss through other sides abrogating other treaties. I suspect that the role of an Internet Czar would be mainly ensuring that fat Internet pipes arrived throughout the third world. George Sorros has been very active in this area, he paid for much of the infrastructure development into Eastern Europe. If we could persuade Bill Gates that his mission in life was to cable Africa to the Internet somehow we might have the whole planet online before 2000. I would not be too worried about WTO banning crypto or attempting looney tune ideas like insisting on OSI protocols. The UN generally does some very worthwhile work in allocating radio frequencies and such like and has done so for many years without problems. They allocate areas of the clarke belt for satelites and do all sorts of mundane tasks. One of the odd things about power is that the larger the scale the more mundane the decisions. At the local level councillors decide to build or close schools and hospitals. At the global level negotiations are held on the size of holes in fishing nets and the exact specifications of ball bearings. If people want to see the Federal government weakened in power the only way to do so is to make it ceed power both upwards and downwards. A national speed limit may be a bad idea (I personally think what was wrong was 55mph) but national standard roadsigns is a good idea. International standard roadsigns are a better idea still. Phill.