The Internet has become important on the world's stage.

Today's religion will be the future's mythology. Both believed at one time by many; but proved wrong by the clever.

Seriously, we are in the midst of the convergence of voice and data and that is challenging the infrastructure of the telephone companies. There are huge commercial interests in the basic technology, but even more so in content delivery and control of content.

We are having Internet Governance discussions and meetings and a very large number of people are discussing the future of the Internet who have no clue as to what the Internet is except that it is important and that they have to be involved.

The initial organisation, we called ourselves the Network Working Group, consisted of 6 to 10 people. We then quickly grew to 30 people and then to 50 people.

It was immediately clear to me that security was a cross-cutting issue, so rather than dividing the space up in parallel with each of the other areas, I wanted security cut across the areas in addition to having its own content.

The Internet has become important on the world's stage.