What will you think were the big 'Net-related stories of 2003 looking back at it a year from now? I'm not sure they will be much different, other than in degree, than the major stories of 2002.

The copyright mafia will continue to strive mightily to make all of modern technology into a glorified CD player; courts and governments will continue to try to make the Internet into a global force while, at the same time, trying to compartmentalize it into national or subnational chunks; the traditional telecom forces, including standards organizations, regulators, carriers and equipment vendors, will continue to try to protect us from the unpredictability of 'Net-based services; and the cops will continue to see the 'Net as a system for gathering data on citizens.

It is possible that the election-forced changes in the U.S., congressional lackeys will change the fortunes of the copyright industry, but I doubt it. So far, whoever Congress is working for, it is hard to see any hint that it includes the consumers of copyrighted material - you know, the people who would like to buy something like a CD or record a TV show and play the music or watch the show whenever and wherever they want. It will be nice if the U.S. Supreme Court slows down the rush to perpetual ownership but, even if it does, the industry will continue to fight to keep us chattel.

With Australian courts ruling that a statement on a Web site halfway around the world could constitute libel in Australia, the states in the U.S. individually outlawing spam and China mandating an Internet free of confusing (such as antigovernment opinion), it is ever clearer that the Internet presents a serious discontinuity for the world's laboriously accreted legal system. Will there be anyone interested in civil liberties and individual rights involved as the system is rebuilt?

I'm writing this while doing something that some regulators do not seem to think is possible. I'm listening to Internet radio (bluegrasscountry.org right now, khyi.com a little while ago). But some regulators seem to think that the Internet needs to get a quality-of-service (QoS) injection to make this, and Internet telephony, possible.

I've had occasion in the last few days to reread some pundit commentary from the mid-1990s. It was full of the promise of ATM bringing QoS to data networks - QoS that was needed before the Internet could become a success.In spite of the better-than-99%, very-high quality I and others get with Internet radio and on IP-based phones (I also have one of these at home) some folks - mostly those whose businesses are threatened by the Internet as it is - are pushing to get regulations to define IP telephony and to "make sure it is good enough" (as one regulator told me). It's not broke and does not need fixing.