Dismissing the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society makes for good headlines but misses the point, says Bill Thompson

The age of the internet has brought with it exciting, fresh ideas about the disintermediation of power and peer accountability. But who is responsible for the standards and functions of the network itself? Bill Thompson charts the history of internet governance, reflects on what has been lost as accountability passes from the hands of the geeks to those of the politicians and lawyers, and offers his proposal for redressing the democratic deficit.

Bill Thompson studied computer science, built his first site in 1994, attended the first international web conference later that year with Tim Berners-Lee, created the Guardian’s first website and has worked with openDemocracy since its first version. But he has a deep, dark secret. He thinks the web sucks. Not just individual sites, but the whole web edifice. He explains why he wants to cure the addiction to HTML and do online publishing properly.

Computer programmers aren’t quite a different species – many of them breed successfully – but they do speak a different language, one which overlaps only contingently with English.

Indymedia was taken offline on 7 October when an unnamed United States government agency went to court on behalf of an unnamed foreign power and seized two computers from the United Kingdom. If this is possible, can independent media survive?

The advocacy of p2p as a libertarian panacea is a covert rationalisation of corporate control and United States power. What the net really needs is democratic regulation to guarantee online equality.

Siva Vaidhyanathan’s argument is entertaining but simplistic, argues this journalist, programmer and editor of openDemocracy’s Media & the Net theme. A democratic and open network regulated by the state, not techno-anarchism, is the only practical approach.

Bill Thompson opens the debate by introducing the 'e' in e-Democracy.

Since May under the deliberately provocative title ‘the people vs copyright’ we have been discussing copyright laws in the digital age. Bill Thompson ponders, summarises and wraps up the debate. If things are moving as quickly in the intellectual property rights world as he suggests, whether it stays wrapped is open to question.

I think that our debate has shown yet again just how little the two sides in this discussion understand each other, and in doing so has justified our chosen name.

A three-part introduction: why debate copyright, what are the possible futures, and what’s the problem?