President Sarkozy of France gathered together the great and the good of the Internet world for a summit on the future of the ‘Net. But were Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg, et al prepared for his lecture on responsibility, just a like a schoolmaster with a flock of misbehaving children?

Today's eG8 conference  was a side-show to the main meeting of the G8 group economic forum being hosted in Paris by the French government. Industry leaders from Europe and the US, including the heads of the  powerful Internet companies, like Google, eBay and Facebook, were invited.  It was driven by President Sarkozy's and his objective to impose controls on the Internet. So even though the preliminaries suggested that it was about economic growth and innovation, Sarkozy's agenda set the tone for the meeting from the beginning. He arrived at 10 am this morning to open the conference.

After some preliminaries praising their inventiveness and entrepreneurial spirit, he plunged straight in to his agenda. The Internet is ‘not a parallel universe stripped of morals and all of 

Read more: eG8: Sarkozy's Social Contract for control of the Internet

In light of the eG8 in Paris this week, in which a number of these industry chiefs, including Vivendi, will be present, the discussions held by a small group of European  industry chiefs  shed light on their plans for the future of the Internet.  

A group of industry chief executives, which includes Apple's Steve Jobs, Alcatel-Lucent's Ben Verwaayen (formerly of BT), Vodafone's Vittorio Colao,   and Vivendi's Jean-Bernard Levy is in talks to  put together proposals  for the future development of the Internet.  The group is known as the CEO Round Table, and it operates under the auspices of European Commission and, in this case, at the specific request of Commissioner for Information Society Neelie Kroes.

There are hints that the group could come out with proposals which will not sit comfortably with Mrs Kroes'  stated public objective of maintaining an open Internet. A  Working Group  headed by Vivendi's 

Read more: Will Vivendi broker a prioritised Internet?

In 2010,  we got  ACTA and the Digital Economy Act. On the other,  Internet freedom of speech  gained a new celebrity status, and in Britain anyway, the establishment has woken  up to the issues.

What can we expect for 2011? Will the new found free speech celebrities  take the issue mainstream?  Will the schizoid patterns of 2010 continue?

***And a happy New Year to all iptegrity readers! ***

First, a quick round-up of 2010.

The year  began with the fight between the European Parliament and the Commission over ACTA.  The Parliament passed a Resolution calling for transparency of the ACTA text, and opposing the inclusion of measures such as 3-strikes.  Contradictorily, this was followed by the Gallo report which supports 3-strikes and other draconian measures such as the blocking of websites.

 In the UK, the Digital Economy Act was bulldozed through the Parliament by the old Labour government under the eyes of the British music industry. In France, the 3-strikes measures began to take effect. The new Hadopi authority was established, warning  letters to Internet subscribers were drafted, and  software companies were asked to design ‘security' software which would ensure that a subscriber could not infringe copyright, by looking at all web traffic and applications on the computer. Internationally, ACTA  was concluded as a  multi-national  pact to enforce copyright against peer-to-peer file-sharing and any other activities on the Internet.

 In the autumn, the gloves came off

Read more: 2011 - a schizoid year for Internet policy?