There are a lot of comments above that deserve a response however I don't want to add any more politics to this board than I already have so I will refrain. If you would like a response send me a private e-mail. Regarding Patrick's comments: The U.S. controls the root commands and basic structure of the internet, we created it, and we have been the custodian of it if you will, although most of those duties have been passed off to universities and private companies. So the US does control the Net to the extent that it can be controlled but this does not mean that the US could turn it OFF per se. The internet by design is decentralized (now into most countries) and difficult to turn-off and would view any attempt to disable or interfere with it by simply re-routing. This is where it shows its Defense Department roots. I don't think it could really be turned off at this point even if we wanted to. Much of the debate about the future of the Net is due to its own success, it can not grow forever with its current addressing system, at one point the Net will have to move to a more robust and expandable addressing system. Without getting too technical there are a few halfway measures in place right now, using more domain suffixes like BIZ, FIRM and others as well as some beefing up of some of the other suite protocols. This will buy some time but the underlying TCP/IP scheme (ver.4 is the current standard) is showing its age and limitations. I believe TCP/IP version 8 is currently in development; none of the previous versions 5, 6, or 7 of TCP/IP have been deployed in large scale, I don't know that there are any definite plans to deploy the new version. The main point here that eventually we'll have to go to a newer version, if you're going to change the Net that would be the time to do it. Bob Taylor