Interesting quotes from the wannabe regulators of the Internet in today's Toronto Star:

"The world should be grateful to Uncle Sam for creating the Internet but it is time for the rest of the world to have a larger voice," says Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, vice-chair of the U.N. Information and Communication Technology task force.

"There is a content divide," Secretary-General Kofi Annan told delegates. "A lot of Web-based information is simply not relevant to the real needs of people. And nearly 70 per cent of the world's Web sites are in English, at times crowding out voices and views."

"Too many people in the world are deprived of access to information and to the tools for accessing it," said Yoshio Utsumi, Secretary-General of the U.N. International Telecommunications Union. "Until we address the injustices of the digital divide, we cannot embrace the promise of cyberspace with a clear conscience."

Believe me, I appreciate the sometimes harsh disparities of wealth and technology among nations, but the idea that English language content is crowding out other sorts of content is nutty. What the policy people don't seem to appreciate is that they can publish their own content, in their own languages, with existing tools. The Internet is also innovation-friendly, so internationalized tools can be developed where they don't exist. Just do it.