I blogged the other day about my skepticism about the suggestion that the internet needs "governing" by bureaucrats and politicians out there in the "real world". The internet without such governance has provided a way for many more people to express themselves to a wider audience than they ever could have done in physical media. And having given it some more thought I can only conclude that any attempt to impose outside governance on it in the past has been counterproductive.

The BBC reports today from Athens that an Internet bill of rights [is] proposed

See, it's not like the existing charters of rights are upheld in respect of the "real world". Even by some of the "better countries" in the world, like the ones who recently decided that they could define what torture meant in the Geneva Conventions.

Many years ago now, in lawless Finland, there was a fantastic service called "anon@penet.fi". Some chap had been very clever and come up with a mechanism where people who did not want their identity revealed for whatever reason could register and his servers would automatically anonymize anything the user posted to email or usenet. It was very useful. People who were scared of "outing" themselves, people making controversial political points, whistle-blowing on employers or others, used it.

Then the FBI saw something they thought illegal from a poster and demanded to have the logs so that they could match Penet's client users with their supposedly anonymous posts. Rather than give in, I seem to recall he destroyed the database. An early attempt to police or govern the web had resulted in an ingenious facility that could nowadays be being used by dissidents from countries who are scant respecters of human rights, just those countries and practices that the "Internet Governance Forum" is now highlighting, to safely spread word about their countries and bring forward the day those regimes were exposed and changed their ways, closing down for everyone.

But forget China and Syria. The UN is utterly unable to enforce human rights as it is in such regimes. Why does it imagine it can do so by "governing" the internet? Indeed, if you know of IndyMedia in London, you'll realise that the FBI are just as bad - raiding and seizing with the collusion of British police and the Home Office a bunch of servers that happen to highlight news issues that are often, shall we say, uncomfortable for western governments.

Let the geeks get on with finding ways around these attempts to silence us and leave governance to the anarchic but massively people skewed internet itself. Every attempt so far has been heavy handed and counter-productive.