Chaos of Internet Will Meet French Sense of Order – NYTimes.com

The New York Times reported on May 20, 2011, about a gathering of 800 luminaries involved with the Internet:

The first-of-its-kind event is being convened by President Nicolas Sarkozy to put the Internet firmly on the agenda of the Group of 8 countries, who meet next week in France. But an alternate view is that the president wants to push his often-invoked vision of a “civilized Internet” — one that is safer for children, more favorable to copyright owners and more lucrative for the French treasury.

Chaos of Internet Will Meet French Sense of Order – NYTimes.com

My own view is that nation states will assert more control over the Internet in the next few years, a debate also mentioned by The Times:

But the more conspiratorially minded French are concerned about Mr. Sarkozy’s intentions. The backdrop of the Tuileries, a physical reflection of the French penchant for imposing order on nature, provides a handy visual metaphor for these critics.

“In spite of a harmless sounding rhetoric, the E-G8 Forum is a smokescreen to cover control of governments over the Internet,” wrote Jérémie Zimmermann, a spokesman for La Quadrature du Net, a group that campaigns against restrictions on the Internet.

Mr. Lévy called this view nonsense, saying that the goal was to generate debate rather than to push the French agenda,

The mention of “chaos” also is interesting.  Last year in Law 832 we talked a bit about complexity theory rather than chaos theory.  I hope to do more with it in the fall 2011 edition of the course.