It's vitally important that people be able to communicate on the Internet in their own languages and use facilities based in those languages. At the same time, it would be quite unfortunate if the potential for human communication and e-commerce between countries were suddenly frustrated because we set up language and naming barriers. I certainly see working with nonhard-wired devices and mobility and portability as very important. I see the continuing evolution in how we name and identify things on the Web and elsewhere as being an important problem that we are beginning to make some progress on. The Domain Name System security issues are very important.
Internationalization is vital.
I am personally very worried about instant messaging - less about the protocols and the issue of AOL vs. everyone else and much more about how we efficiently manage a technology that has a lot of potential for being extremely useful and a lot of potential for making noise in people's lives. Figuring out whether a new top-level domain should be allocated and what it should be called is one of these areas in which the IAB and the IETF have opinions but no competence. One of the hot buttons in the IETF is the issue of migrating from the current IPv4 to IPv6. I am statistician enough and data analyst enough to be able to read the handwriting on the wall about Internet address space exhaustion and to have my own predictions about how quickly that's going to happen. But IPv6 is not a protocol that I could design.