I posted the video of the United Nations’ representative Sha Zukang losing it about a week ago but forgot to stick up a blog post about it.

It was a remarkable thing: Egypt’s first lady had inserted her own agenda into the Internet Governance Forum’s schedule – which caused no end of problems as everything had to be reshuffled. But also her visit brought with it some over-the-top security precautions: no mobile phones; extra invites to be allowed into the building; restricted access; and – the big issue – everyone being locked down in the main room, unable to leave, while she wandered around in the “village” of booths outside.

Anyway, after the First Lady’s little segment about protecting kids online and a panel of “experts” forced to find some way of tying the IGF into the youth of today and protecting kids online — which was a complete waste of everyone’s time, to be frank — she wandered off but left everyone stuck in the main room.

Not everyone was happy about this. Many people wanted to just go to the toilet having been in the room for several hours. The UN’s head honcho – a very prickly Chinese man called Sha Zukang – was also unhappy as he had trouble getting back into the room to chair the next session on the future of the IGF itself.

As you can see from the video below, Sha was annoyed with the fact that lots of people were standing at the back waiting to be allowed to leave. But even when the situation was explained to him, he was already too wound up to care and came out with an extraordinary outburst.

Considering this has only been one or two minutes, it was really too much – and everyone commented as such. Of the many comments I heard at the back of the room, and that evening, the most common description of the short-fused Zukang was “prick”. The event also sparked a few UN old hands to recall other similar outbursts.

Anyway, here for your viewing pleasure is what happened:

It seems that the Internet is catching on with the most powerful men in the world. Both the Pope and the new US president Barack Obama have this week announced new web strategies and told anyone that would listen how much they love this Internet.

The conversion is hardly surprising – both men derive most of their enormous power from being able to communicate directly to millions. And if there’s one thing the Internet does well, it is mass communication. Here the question though: who loves the Internet more – Obama or the Pope?

Let’s find out in a head-to-head competition…

Obama	The Pope
YouTube
The Obama team have embraced YouTube so heartily, you wonder whether it feels a bit winded. First there was the Change.gov YouTube channel, then the Inauguration YouTube channel, and now the White House YouTube channel. Where’s it going to stop? A Potus 24-hour headcam? But is the love fading already? There were 67 videos posted to the Change.gov channel; but only 14 to the Inauguration site and so far just four to the White House. With just over 70,000 channels views and just under 7,000 subscribers, this is not looking so good. Is the message – it’s fine when you need the message out there for votes, but not so fine when you’re in the job? And aren’t the videos, well, a bit boring?	The new kid on the block, Ratzinger aka Benedict XVI has ventured the first time into YouTube territory this week. The result? Over 200,000 channel views and just over 6,000 subscribers and climbing… If you want a power base of followers, you’ll be hard pushed to beat the Catholics. What’s more, His Holiness’ people seem to understand the game better than the US presidential team, posted 16 videos already and, according to their new media man Father Federico Lombardi, they are planning to post up to three more every day! The videos themselves are coming it at under two minutes – much snappier than the ponderous-by-comparison Obama versions. And the Pope is offering his site in four languages – Italian, English, Spanish and German. A late start but an impressive one.
Phone, text and email
Obama has famously fought and won with the Secret Service to be allowed to keep his Blackberry and so be in instant email and text contact with his devoted followers, sorry, his senior advisers. The president is also supposedly on Twitter – although the messages are no more than staff-written links to other events and rarely updated. In the run-up to the election, the Obama/Biden team also went mobile-crazy, setting up a WAP site (a wap site?), sending frequent update texts, logging supporter’s mobile phone numbers and even producing a special Obama application for the iPhone. A frequent emailer, it is possible that a laptop will appear for the first time on the desk in Oval Office for Obama’s use. Previously, Presidents had been prevented from using email so that it didn’t become a part of official archival records and so eventually be made public (so far only a handful of emails from president@whitehouse.gov have ever been sent; fewer received). That may be about to change.	The Pope has never been so much as pictured with a mobile phone, and it’s not clear that he has ever sent an email. However, in his favour he does have his own Popemobile, which is famous throughout the world for being a bullet-proof popefish bowl on the back of a small Mercedes. Not that this lack of person use has stopped the Pope from reaching his flock. The Vatican promotes His Holiness’ email address – benedictxvi@vatican.va – on its website, and you can apparently get a daily text message from the Pope from PopeMessage.com – although the $9.95 a month price tag make me a little suspicious. On a recent visit to his home in Austria, the Archdiocese of Vienna did the job for him – offering a free daily text service with quotes from him delivered to the faithful. The same was true for World Youth Day 2008. At 81 years old, perhaps it’s a little too much to ask of the Pope to be typing messages into a G1, but even so he falls down here.
The World Wide Web
It was thanks to the radical use of the Internet as a social networking tool that Obama’s team managed to raise so much money and get so many people on the ground moving. It was impressive, although there are already questions whether the same techniques are allowed or even legal when in power. The White House website has had a much-needed overhaul from something that crossed bland announcements with an historical archive into something more dynamic. But, interestingly, the same ideas as on the campaign trail have been pulled into the White House, which again makes you wonder whether Obama really loves the Internet – or just its ability to get voters excited when your rival is out-of-touch enough to admit that he has never emailed or been online. But how far does Obama really embrace the Internet? His team certainly appear to have misunderstood the value of blogs as amore personal form of communication – using the official blog to do little more than list press announcements. The earlier exciting use of photos also seems to have vanished. There is an official White House photographer – why not a Flickr feed of his pictures? Currently, there is no Wi-Fi at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.	The Vatican was one of the earliest huge-organization adopters of the Internet, sticking up a website long before most people were online. It wasn’t a very good website but it was better than nothing. The website can been through a few iterations since then, and its front page was all the rage just a few years’ ago but there is not much content once you’ve got past the homepage and it is still sporting a "Christmas 2008" masthead nearly a month after it all ended. That’s not to say that the Vatican isn’t savvy when it comes to the Internet – representatives from the Vatican turn up at alot of Internet industry functions and also keeps an eye on the policy issues – see this interview with the Vatican’s top geek, Sister Judith Zoebelein. There are a huge number of Catholic networking site – at least one of which the Pope has supported. So, overall, quite bad, except for the fact that the Vatican has its own piece of the Internet. At 110 acres and with less than 1,000 inhabitants, the Vatican is the smallest state in the world – and yet it owns and runs the Internet suffix ".va", with just 23 domains, all of them with the Pope’s oversight. For what he lacks in depth, he makes up for in size.
Institutional Change
Come into power promising change, and with new media credentials fluttering around him like magic doves, people are expecting the Internet to have a similar revolutionary impact on the White House as it has in many other parts of society. The revolution was flagged up in an early blog post on the new White House website, promising that "Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov". But all it gave was three vague buzzwords – communication, transparency, participation – and a form to fill in. One of those new media advisers then had a second stab at explaining what new, exciting development there were. And they were pages on: YouTube, Facebook and MySpace; a pdf database of boring policy meetings with a search on "internet" yields only seven results, one being a briefing paper from Microsoft and two other a meeting with the blind community, and another on "interfaith immigration". Apparently learning little from the UK government’s e-petition approach (good idea, introduced without sufficient thought and safeguards); the entire participation element appears to be the Citizen’s Briefing Book – or, to give it it’s more accurate title, The Mentally Ill Citizen’s Ranting Book. So, far from stunning. Perhaps the much-anticipated plan to hire the US government’s first-ever Chief Technology Office (CTO) will see the Internet used as more than shiny new baubles. The setting looks good – a series of stated goals and priorities – with two of the six directly involving the Internet. But so far, the most interest in the job has come from endless speculation in the media and self-promoting Net heads swelling up with their own ideas about what the new CTO should do. The one ground-breaking idea may end up stillborn after Julius Genachowski turned it down to become FCC chairman and have some real influence, and journalists in a frenzy have found themselves reporting that none of the big names in tech want the job either. So far, not looking promising.	Originally not a great fan of the Internet, complaining that it can be a negative force that promotes hatred, intolerance and degradation, the Pontiff has warned to it in recent months, giving a speech just this week on New Technologies, New Relationships: Promoting a culture of Respect, Dialogue and Friendship. Recognising his age and the digital revolution, he picked out the young as being the key to future communication for the Catholic Church. "It falls, in particular, to young people, who have an almost spontaneous affinity for the new means of communication, to take on the responsibility for the evangelization of this ‘digital continent’," he said. The head of the Pontifical Councils for communicating with the faithful, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, told reporters that statement was a "real watershed" and went on to talk about how the internet had profoundly changed the world of communications. And while Obama’s team want every American with broadband access, it seems that the pope wants everyone in the world online, saying that it would be a “tragedy” if the "extraordinary potential" of the internet "were not made accessible to those who are already economically and socially marginalized". The Internet should be open to all, he went on and modern communication tools are "truly a gift to humanity". If that’s not a ringing endorsement, nothing is. Despite this enlightened viewpoint however, you will be hard pushed to see where the Pope’s love of all things new media will extend to the Vatican itself. For an organization that still works largely in secret and maintains centuries-old traditions that don’t even pretend to make sense (burning logs with coloured smoke; making guards dress up like weird toys; and so on), it is not at all clear that Benedict XVI is letting the Net into his life. Certainly better rhetoric than Obama’s team, but to fail to embrace what the Net can do for you is to love it only at a distance.
The RESULTS!
The WINNER! with 13 out of a possible 20 points is Barak Obama. A strong love for the Internet during the heady days of campaigning may be waning now that he’s in power, but his personal use and experience of the Internet, email and mobile phones is just enough to push him in front of the Pontiff. A close call that should have seen Obama zooming ahead. Must try harder.	The LOSER! but with a respectable 12 out of 20 points is Pope Benedict XVI. It was neck-and-neck until the very end, with the Pope’s recent conversion to the power of New Media nearly enough to claim the prize. But he was let down by a lack of personal awareness and knowledge – it’s one thing to be advised; quite another to understand it intrinsically. Plus of course, Obama already has good form, where the Vatican is still largely reliant on others picking up the gauntlet. On the plus side, the Pope has a much longer timeframe in which to get across his vision. Obama has four years to make a splash; Ratzinger has got until the end of his natural life.

I have been determinedly trying not to write any news stories so I can get on with writing the Sex.com book but I got a phonecall very early this morning from the spokesman for ICANN explaining that late last night the Board had approved the new contract for the dotcom registry.

“Were there any changes made to it?” I asked.
“Ummm, no,” he replied.

So that's how I first heard of ICANN's impending death.

In fact, before I even go into the contract and what is means, I think it's worth pointing out that I also sent a series of emails to a number of ICANN Board members exactly a month ago. In each I explained that I was “putting the questions to you which, through past experience of these things, I will be asking anyway in a month's time”.

The basic email was the same each time:

• There have been not one but two public comment periods, demonstrating ICANN's transparency and bottom-up process
• That VeriSign has made it very clear that it will not move back any further
• That ICANN’s hands are tied because of the DoC’s role in negotiations, that the DoC believes VeriSign has offered a fair settlement
• That time is running out (time is always running out in these situations for one reason or other)
• That it may not be ideal but ICANN has to approve the deal because the VeriSign lawsuits make it impossible to breathe and because the MoU is coming up

You will then be asked to vote on the agreement.
 
My question is: Do you believe that such a momentous decision should be delayed for a few weeks so it can be properly and publicly thrashed out in Wellington?
 
If so, will you raise the issue at such a Board meeting, will you ask for it to be put on the public record, and will you vote against the agreement rather than just abstain in order to register your opposition?

And that is exactly what has happened. Nine for; five against; one abstention. The Board has held no less than four special meetings on the VeriSign contract, two in the past week. The decision has been pushed through to avoid the New Zealand public meeting, and the entire Internet community – which ICANN claims to serve in a “bottom-up decision-making process” – has been completely ignored because it is in ICANN's interests to approve the deal.

The deal condenses everything that is wrong with how the Internet is currently run in one tiny document. How vital decisions about the global Internet are made by one of three bodies – ICANN, VeriSign and the US Department of Commerce – and how their complicated and difficult relationships consistently produce decisions and agreement and settlements that are a million miles from what they should be, and could be if the globalness of the Internet was actually pulled in.

ICANN thinks it has got the best deal because ICANN continues to inhabit a tiny world of its own making where VeriSign and the DoC loom large and everyone else is a distraction. What ICANN really honestly hasn't realised is that its authority is hanging by a thread.

I knew that a special meeting of the Board would be called prior to Wellington, and I knew what would be said and what would happen, because that is the method by which ICANN always pushes through things that shouldn't be approved.The fact that there were several special meetings demonstrates at least that some Board members have started fighting against their expected rubber-stamp role.

But the fact remains that ICANN retains the same culture where ageing chairman Vint Cerf continues to push his personal and out-dated views and undermines anyone that argues with him, and CEO Paul Twomey continues to cut any secret deal he can that will give him control of a more powerful organisation.

Underneath them come all the people that are willing them to succeed so they can take over a government of the Internet in five years' time.

[You can find out what individual Board members felt about the deal in the statements made on the record and released two days later by ICANN.]

While all this empire building and secret deal making is going on, those involved have completely lost track of what they are actually deciding.

Should VeriSign be given permanent control of the dotcom registry? The answer is startlingly obvious: No, it shouldn't. It is in no-one's interests except VeriSign's.

Should VeriSign be allowed to raise prices? No, of course not. The prices of domains are going down. Why on earth is ICANN pulling itself into a contract that rips people off? How stupid does it have to be? Why not restructure the contract to let market forces decide? Then VeriSign can raise its prices anyway and we can stop pretending that the dotcom registry isn't a special case.

Should VeriSign be given rights over expiring domains? No, no way. And not because the idea of a registry owning expiring domains is a bad one. In fact, the current system – where a dozen companies constantly bombard name servers with renewal requests is absolutely ridiculous and cannot be allowed to continue. But should VeriSign be given it? No, because of SiteFinder. There is no reason why another company can't be given all rights to expiring domains, then that company can be set up in such a way that it is entirely equitable.

ICANN has simply signed off on VeriSign's top-three wishlist because it is absolutely desperate to stop VeriSign's lawsuits and because it thinks that if it can just get VeriSign to accept it as an authority, it is over the hill and safe.

The problem with getting used to cutting dodgy deals is that, after a while, the human being becomes incapable of recognising when they should just say No. The individual loses that vital bit of wider clarity which marks great men from powerful men.

I would argue, on a tangent, that that is exactly what happened in the UK when prime minister Tony Blair decided to go to war in Iraq with the United States. There is no doubt that Blair knew that the war was a fallacy but he went with it because he thought he was tight with enough powerful people that it would never unravel.

Having cut dozens of deals and come out the other end gleaming, he failed to recognise that this one was different. That no leader should ever cut a deal over a war.

ICANN may well have cut a similar deal with the new dotcom contract. This one was different. It was for the dotcom registry. ICANN has been through a hell of a lot in the past decade but just when it thinks it is the most powerful and stable it has ever been, the irony is that it has never been weaker.

The most important people have now spoken at the first resumed discussion of Internet governance – and it looks as though a big fight is brewing.

The US has, unsurprisingly, stood firm and demanded the status quo be maintained. Having finally got the microphone working – something that added a somewhat testy edge to the statement, the US representative went on:

“If the Internet is to reach its full potential as a medium it is vital that it is free from burdensome inter-governmental control.” The strength of the Internet is in its decentralisation and the suggested changes to this existing mechanisms and organisations would be an “obstacle to globalisation”.

He ended by calling on “all our colleagues to work with us”.

The colleagues that the US is referring to are most clearly represented by the UK/EU – which caused the current controversy by shifting away from the US position and suggesting an inter-governmental oversight body for ICANN and an public policy forum.

The EU made an intriguing statement however, saying only that it had “looked carefully at all positions, including our own” – but failed to say what conclusions it had come to. Instead, it put all the weight in the chairman, Ambassador Khan, saying that it hoped he would be able to steer the five sessions that remain to a successful conclusion.

Who would want that job at the moment?

China called for the UN to take over the Internet – and exclaimed – rather too loudly – that it could not understand what everyone’s problem with this solution was.

So, in broad summary, not a thing has changed since the end of PrepCom3. But there is a real sense that people recognise they will have to come to agreement – and very, very soon.

There is very little time, alot of ground to cover and it looks as though this may get heated.

I was very nearly tied into a 12-month contract with T-Mobile. In fact, I only had two days left before my seven-day grace period with my new phone ran out. The issue was that I had chosen a new phone for one reason and one reason only – I wanted to be able to pick up my email on it.

I received the phone and spent four days calling T-Mobile and Nokia and trawling the Internet to try to get my phone to work (to access my email) but even inputting numerous settings into the phone by hand didn't word. Finally I popped into Carphone Warehouse and the bloke there told me that T-Mobile simply did not allow me to pick up external email – at all.

This was news to me. So I called T-Mobile for the third time that week, determined to get a straight answer. I finally got it. T-Mobile does not allow access to external email accept through specific models. Except it won't tell you this.

In fact, it has a policy of purposefully misleading customers by referring them to the phone manufacturer and your ISP time and again. This has the effect of delaying any decision you may have to return the phone while you are trying to sort out the issue. If you don't sort it out within seven days and return the phone, you are tied into a 12-month contract.

T-Mobile clearly has a very compelling financial incentive to fail to inform its customers about its approach to external email.

I recorded the phone conversation for posterity. Here is a transcript of that conversation and a MP3 of it at the bottom.

I have since moved to Vodafone and have absolutely no problems getting hold of my email.

Me: I upgraded just under a week ago, the whole point being that I could get at email on my new phone. And it’s been impossible to get at it. I’ve got a Nokia 6230i. Now I spoke to yourselves, T-Mobile and you said ‘oh you need to speak to Nokia’. And I spoke to Nokia and they said you need to speak to T-Mobile.

So I went on the Internet and I got all the settings. And that hasn’t worked either. I simply cannot get. T-Mobile working. I have to get some kind of GPRS settings to get hold of my email.

Then I went to Carphone Warehouse and the guys there said – and I don’t know whether this is true, which is partly why I’m calling – that T-Mobile has a walled garden and I will not be able to access external email.

Right, okay. Just bear with me for a sec. [2 mins 3 seconds later...] Hey Mr McCarthy. What you need to find out is… you will need to get in touch with Nokia unfortunately…

No, I’ve just spoken to Nokia. I went through it 10 times with them. And they told me you [T-Mobile] need to send me the GPRS settings to my phone.

Right. To get external email?

Yes. The first question is: Is it possible for me to get external email on this phone through T-Mobile? Is that possible?

It is down to the handset…

Yeah, okay, the Nokia 6230i. Is it possible for me…

That’s why we’re advising you to go ask Nokia…

No, no. You must be able to tell me whether it is possible.

Right, basically, what you need is whether your handset has an email client.

Of course it does. You should know. You know this. It’s the 6230i. It is not Nokia – either T-Mobile lets me pick up email on this phone or it does not.

It’s not something that we support. But if you have the correct settings which you need…

Exactly, and it is T-Mobile that needs to send me those settings. It is not Nokia.

Right, basically it was… T-Mobile did not send them settings…

No I need you to be able to send me those settings.

But we don’t do them…

Well then where am I supposed to get them from?

It you will bear with me for two seconds, I’m just about to tell you that.

Okay.

You get them from your Internet Service Provider…

No, no, I’ve done that. That is not possible. I need to input some T-Mobile settings. They either exist or they don’t exist. If they do not exist I do not want either the phone or the price plan I’m on.

[Five second pause] Just bear with me a sec [39 seconds later] Hello Mr McCarthy, basically, we do not do them settings. You can get them from your Internet Service Provider. That is the only people who will be able to give you them.

They are T-Mobile settings that I need. No other settings.

We can send you, you can send email but not external email.

So are you telling me I am not able to access external email through T-Mobile with…

It’s not something that we support.

What does that mean? Does that mean I can do it or I can’t do it?

It means it doesn’t work.

If you get settings from your Internet Service Provider then you may be able to do that, but we do not support it…

What are these settings? These settings are T-Mobile settings.

If it’s external it will need to be something from your Internet Service Provider. We do not do them.

No, that’s not true. I can’t magic up a connection to my ISP using a phone through your network. It doesn’t happen. They have to be T-Mobile settings. So either these settings exist or they do not exist.

Are you set up for your mobile Internet?
Yes.

I can send email but not receive it, is that what you’re saying?

That’s right.

Well why didn’t you say that?

But not external email.

Why didn’t you say that? I’ve spent three, four days on this and no one’s told me I will not be able to receive email on this phone using T-Mobile. The only person is some bloke in Carphone Warehouse.

Yeah, you cannot receive.

Why didn’t you say that before?

I was saying we don’t support…

You know that support doesn’t mean receive. Support can mean anything.

It’s not something that we… we don’t do mobile email.

Right so look – what I need to do is I need to change this now. Is there any way that I can receive – using any phone with T-Mobile – external email. Does T-Mobile do that?

Right, basically the phones we do where you can receive external email would be the MDA range and also the Blackberry devices.

Okay, but no Nokias?

No.

Okay, I've just got off the phone with the International Messaging Development Manager for T-Mobile – a nice bloke called Matt Rogers.

He tells me that it *is* possible to get outside of T-Mobile’s network by inputting these settings into your phone:

GPRS APN address: general.t-mobile.uk
Gateway (IP) address :149.254.001.010
Username : user
Password: wap

There is a caveat though – you can’t be sure that your ISP will allow you to pick up or send email even with these put into the phone.

I am certain I put these exact settings in my phone and they didn’t work however. An official response will come tomorrow which I will then add to the story I wrote for The Register.

Mr Rogers readily accepted however that these settings are not available on T-Mobile’s website and that its customer services and call centre also have no access to any information on this.

Next month, T-Mobile will release its own configuration service that will automatically store the relevant email settings for your ISP on your phone. Customer services will also be briefed and provided with the information to deal with such queries in future.

Again though, I tried Nokia’s Web-based configuration process for my exact phone and my exact ISP and it still didn’t work.

Anyway, it’s a success. T-Mobile is now not only aware of the problem (and I put in five phonecalls, two to the company’s press office outlining the problems, which cannot be good). Even better – it is doing something about it. A result. I like being a journalist sometimes. Hopefully I’ve saved thousands of people a load of hassle.

Thanks to all those that have sent me emails and commented on this story below btw.