ICANN appears to have bought into claims that the Internet has broken or will break. Anyone who has used it in the last three weeks knows that claim to be false. More likely, ICANN caved under the pressure from some in the Internet community for whom this is a technology-religion issue about whether the Internet should be used for these purposes. For this vocal minority, resentment lingers at the very fact that the Internet is used for commercial purpose, which ignores the fact that it's a critical part of our economy.
Newsflash: the Web is not all there is to the Internet.
The Redondo Beach state senator thinks Microsoft has a bad attitude when it comes to spam. As a California legislator for the past 10 years, Bowen has drafted and introduced bills intended to tie spammers' hands and better protect consumers' privacy. But more recently, she has criticized Microsoft for lobbying against certain spam bills, including one she championed. Bowen has gone so far as to say "trusting Microsoft to protect computer users from spam is like putting telemarketers in charge of the do-not-call list."
She's also a fan of science fiction writers William Gibson and Neal Stephenson: Both gentlemen have spent a lot of time thinking about where technology might go and what kind of a society we might see as a result of changes in technology. Their works have been very influential to me, as I start really speaking about what's likely to happen. Over the course of the time that I've worked on technology issues and read Stephenson and Gibson and other such writers, some things I read as science fiction in 1994 are now reality.
Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits. -- Robert Louis Stevenson