People who view the internet's development with suspicion are often accused of being melancholy lefties. For not to understand that this powerful medium has transcendent power and will have a democratising affect on our world is equivalent to spinning conspiracy theories.

Well I am usually one of the accused, not because I have no faith in the medium but because it is not fashionable to balance faith with criticism. Democracy does not happen overnight, but anybody that points this out is a pessimist.

Well as a pessimist I was invited to the biannual conference of the International Telecommunications Society, the Mecca of telecommunications lobbying. It was the most unfortunate and entertaining invite imaginable. Three days went by and the word 'democracy' was not heard, three days went by and the words 'communication' or 'public communication' were not heard. The agenda was neatly defined by the increasingly populist libertarian mood of 'give the people what they want'. The internet was talked about like a delivery platform, a digital supermarket whose shelves are eagerly waiting to be filled with thrilling innovative commodities. The honesty of such a definition caught me by surprise and Adorno's criticism of the capitalist culture kept on spinning in my head: it is not culture and business but only business. This is not new. What is new is the certainty that this is democratic.

So I put on my red shoes (as one does on such occasions) and stood up to argue against the naturalisation of these ever-so-shining libertarian assumptions. "There is no debate and that can't be good", I said, "you have naturalised certain things about what the internet is and should be, normative claims are being presented as technologically dictated realities. Western Europe has a strong tradition in defining communication and culture in terms of the public good, the internet cannot possibly erode this in the name of a friction-free digital capitalist paradise.".

"So you don't believe in free trade?", an MIT researcher objected, to which I responded: "Until the US. government liberalises its defence industry you have no right to talk about free trade".

No conspiracy theory could ever portray the complacency of those who are deciding the internet's fate; no red shoes could ever seriously challenge them. My words were not a threat, for one cannot threaten anybody who had paid you to threaten them.

ITS 98 was held in Stockholm this June. The theme of the Conference was Beyond Convergence and all the papers presented including Korinna Patelis's can be found at http://www.its98.org

Korinna Patelis [cop02p@gold.ac.uk]