What the USA makes its ISPs do is an internal matter. Pressuring registrars to kill domains is another. Grey market and fake pharmaceuticals is one thing but when you get into matters of opinion and national ethics then it is something completely different. At least ICANN stayed away, however they are still under the influence of the USA courts and the Whitehouse - look at the farce about the XXX TLD.

I'm not a great fan of the ITU as it is slow and cumbersome but I do feel that ICANN, IANA and the rest should be moved under their control. The Internet doesn't belong to any single country regardless of who came up with the original protocols. This is preferable to having multiple organisations running different root servers which can lead to the same URL being resolved to different IP addresses.

Andy
Doha, Qatar

I've had a freecom Internet Radio[1] for about 2 years now which cost about $100 (GBP 60).

Its a flexible unit with WLAN, Ethernet etc.

Andy

[1] http://www.freecom.com/product.asp?CatID=1148017

Its possible the retroactive parts of these changes are in breach of UK/EU data protection laws. The issue is that a holder of personal data may only use information for the purposes for which it was provided. If the person supplying the data wished to keep it relatively private and Facebook then later make it public without the informed prior consent of the user then there is a probable breach of the regulations.

Of course Facebook will say that they are not based in the EU but they probably do have servers and interests there and gain revenue from EU based advertisers.

rocamargo writes
"I've been thinking a lot lately about the end of the Space Shuttle. For someone my age, the shuttle really *IS* space travel. I'm going to be really sad to see STS-133 land."

I suspect the crew will be really happy to see STS-133 land! :-)