I can't help writing this, because the on slides projected on the wall, and explained by a professor from Geneva, is a proposal by France to ban copyright infringers from the Net. The proposal is been front-burnered in France for more than a year. Similar proposals have been moving in the same direction in other countries, including the U.K. and Australia. A sweeping citizen surveillance bill has been debated for more than a year in Sweden, and may be passed by the time you read this. Acording to the Open Net Initiative, Internet traffic is filtered -- or suspected to be filtered -- in dozens of Asian, Middle Eastern and African countries.

What amazes me about the discussion going on around me is that these proposals can be taken seriously at all. I just said so to the professor, adding "This makes as much sense to me as proposing barcodes for babies". He replied that it's to get a "foreign" perspective. Although this conversation is happening in the U.S., his context is the European Union, where sentiment is currently running against the French proposal. To be fair, it's pretty clear he opposes it too.

But still, there is psychosis here. Contact with reality has been lost.

To start, most of these schemes, including the French one, see the Net as a "service". In most cases that's how people get on the Net; but