Yes, I'm very busy, but you can still buy my book. The biggest stories of the year 2000 involved the return of business disciplines to the Web industry. The big story of 2001 will be attempts by national governments to enforce contradictory laws on the Web. France is demanding that Yahoo shield its people from auctions of Nazi artifacts that are legal in other countries . Mandating that ISPs filter access at their servers is considered a Chinese game, but it would be more appropriate at this point to call it a government game.
Motivated users can get around server-side filters, but filters do work against casual users.
Governments figure that if they can assure themselves that most people are complying with their content restrictions, they can then mandate usage tracking to catch most of the rest. Mandating that ISPs control and report to government on their users remains the key feature of the Cybercrime agreement now being completed by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg . While the treaty is being created on behalf of democratic governments it is not being created democratically. Instead, it is being written in secret by cops and spies. Thus the treaty makes certain types of software illegal, and mandates that all ISPs keep records on users that will be made available to any police agency in a country signing the treaty.