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During the "Internet Governance Forum" last month I wrote that we need to leave the internet alone if we want to foster human rights, instead of governments trying to regulate it and using it as yet another stick with which to beat non-compliant governments with bad records on human rights. I said that the internet was a tool of democracy and human rights because clever public spirited people like the folk behind "anon@penet.fi" many years ago would invent things that allowed people to express themselves and get information without censorship.

And so, only a few weeks later, it's nice to hear about...

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web censorship 'bypass' unveiled:

There is growing concern about web censorship

A tool has been created capable of circumventing government censorship of the web, according to researchers.

The free program has been constructed to let citizens of countries with restricted web access retrieve and display web pages from anywhere.

Interestingly, if there had been strong regulation of goings on out here in the internet, the sort of peer-to-peer sharing techniques that are being used in this little censorship getaround would probably have never been invented. They are the techniques that were once created to allow sharing of copyrighted material or even computer malware. A case, if ever there was one, I'd say, of two wrongs combining to make a right after all.

In other news today comes the idea that bloggers need some kind of "voluntary code" of conduct...

BBC NEWS | Politics | Voluntary code for blogs 'needed':

The flow of content "should not be regulated by any government"

Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told.

Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin said he opposed government regulation of the internet, saying it should a place "in which views bloom".

But unless there was a voluntary code of conduct there would be no form of redress for people angered at content.

Nonsense. The article goes on to say that Technorati estimate that every day 10,000 new blogs are created and 1.3 million articles produced. Which means that in total I keep an eye on just about two per cent of just one day's increase in the number of blogs. There's your code of conduct right there - I will read those that interest me or make sense and discard the rest, even if I ever find them. I find them by recommendation from others or through searching for specific things and then assessing on the basis of recent postings how useful they will be to me.

Besides, for years, complainants have actually had the upper hand - it's relatively easy to get a website taken down even now because ISPs are scared of action against them that they will happily censor whole sites rather than investigate the veracity of complaints against them. The fact that we now have these social sites and large blogging platforms that will probably have more backbone and stand up to such complaints is evening that out a little.

On the one hand we have Antonia Bance regaling us about her recent e-democracy conference (arranged in Budapest by the government department that was previously headed by the now e-for-environment David Milliband) and that Cllr Tall bloke going on about his nearly win in some e-politix Oscars.

I am clearly never going to make any money in this life, as I am always five years ahead of everyone.

When I moved down to Oxford twelve years ago I tried to persuade our local book sellers to let me help them develop a retail over the internet system. They weren't yet interested. And when I was a city councillor, five years or so ago now, I created a website for my scrutiny committee to try to give another mechanism for the public to get involved in the scrutiny review of "Drugs and Street Crime" we were doing. (There's a subtle connection here - the author of that drugs and street crime report, Richard Huggins of Oxford Brookes University, also at the time had just co-authored a book called "New Media and Politics" - about all this sort of stuff as well).

Of course, back then, I actually got bollocked for doing so by the council. Okay, so I did use the council's brand - logo and website style - but so what, I was a councillor and this was on council business that would not have come to pass (indeed hasn't since so far as I am aware) without someone getting on and doing it. But it seemed an obvious way at the time of offering a new way that people could participate in the discussions going on on their behalf at the Town Hall.

But now I believe these gongs and conferences are actually out of date before they've really got started too.

You see now it's not a case of getting government online, but the case that as more people get online less government is required. It is true that cyberspace, at the moment at least, is a great leveller. Often those effects are seen in the most unsavoury ways - paedophiles pretending to be kids that they could never get away with in the real world and so on. But think a little further and you realise that the internet and access to it can give people the sort of advantages that once upon a time the state was set up to ensure.

Economies of scale, for example - I could now join a purchasing consortium with members across Europe to ensure I can buy into goods and services at the best prices. I can choose from suppliers all over the place. I can shop around for health care more easily. I could even go without pay if I were remunerated in Amazon wish-list items or Tesco online credits - sort that out Mr Taxman! I can already, in many aspects of life, effectively choose the jurisdiction in which to live and transact business.

It could have the potential, ironically given the huge business money that is spreading the net ever wider, to make it far easier for me to trade without those global conglomerate intermediaries we currently love or hate. Why should I need to buy my chocolate from Nestle at all if I can buy direct from some Ghanaian farmer put online by the MIT $100 laptop say? One of the first and most exciting internet purchases for me was when I discovered a small co-operative producer of Champagne where I could get 1990 vintage pop for a tenner a bottle and got a case for a Lib Dem election night party! Small businesses come to love it - it extends their reach far beyond anything else they can afford to do.

The same friend who introduced me to Open Capital Partnerships put it this way...

Once upon a time markets were decentralised and disconnected. The local village market - walking distance away at most - had to be pretty self-sufficient.

Then came decentralised and connected. Transport improved, and whilst you would still have to trade for things locally, agents could then transfer them to another, connected, market.

Then came centralised and connected - where we are now - where all the apparatus of states and global trade pulls things together. We have globally trusted currencies and government to enforce standards and so on.

But now we are able to go back to decentralised and super-connected when a lot of those intermediaries may become unnecessary. We are able to trade with almost anyone else in the world, at least within the forseeable future. Governments' role in this environment is not to enforce or do anything but to enable us to do more for ourselves. So we should support mechanisms to make it easier for people to be included in this brave new world.

A wireless mesh for Oxford would be a good start - that every household and business from Grenoble Road to Lakeside should be within direct access of superfast wireless broadband telecommunications at minimal connection cost. (By my reckoning this would be a minor capital project - about £1.5m capital cost).

Government could offer a role as "identity management" agents - to give trading counterparties more confidence by having a single identity authority. But on the other hand, why should we use theirs? In the business world there are competing trust management companies - Thawte and Verisign and so on (though these two may have been merged more recently, have they? I seem to remember reading something). And the whole rationale of trading between individual counterparties is that you save money by learning to trust that counterparty, not needing someone else to guarantee it at additional cost.

I'll bet these roles of "e-government" came up very little in Budapest - it would, after all, be a case of turkeys voting for Christmas. Maybe someone will read this this time and invite me to the equivalent conference in 2011 when they're ready to hear these things...:)

So, I've just once again put my trust in delivery companies to get an address right and follow fairly simple instructions about what to do because I'll be out when they arrive. But I do want them tomorrow, or I would not have paid the premium to get it delivered quickly rather than wait a week.

But if that had been Tesco I would have been able to sign up for a particular time slot when hopefully it would have been convenient for me to be around to take delivery personally, even in the evenings or at weekends. If this is the way of commerce in the future, mainstream delivery firms, whose main business is shipment and delivery rather than grocery sales of course, need to do something similar.

Is it just their size that makes Tesco viable doing it? I suspect not - there are ways I am sure retailers could collaborate in a delivery service. Is it because Tesco probably tend to concentrate on what business courier services would say were "out of hours"? Maybe, but it's surely a very logical growth area? Is it the logistics? All goods in the Tesco system are there at the local store or you don't get them. You could make such a system of convenient time slots contingent on the goods getting into the shipping system at a particular time perhaps.

Either way, it needs to happen. If the deliveries are not delivered properly tomorrow it's a twenty mile round trip, and, without taking time off work to do it, not till a week Saturday, to go and fetch it from the local courier depot during opening hours - the very least they could do would be to staff those delivery offices till late at night and at weekends and allow people to collect goods "out of hours".

In the future the big high volume shipping and delivery companies are going to control more and more of our commerce; they need persuading to change their MO to fit around the lives of an increasing proportion of their clients' customers.

...but if some of you arrived here because of a scurrilous Labour leaflet trying to discredit me because of my opinion on drugs issues, I wanted to settle your minds, I hope, with a synopsis of my position...

I am indeed in principle in favour of legalizing the vast majority of recreational drugs - for adults. Once legalized, their supply should be regulated, controlled through a licensing system, and taxed - which can help fund more treatment instead of prison cells. It is not the state's job to prevent adults in particular choosing to put something into their own body, or indeed, like dangerous sports and so on, what they do with their own body, if others are not harmed by that. Such laws actually remove the ability of the individual to be morally responsible for what they themselves do.

That is not to say that I want to see an increase in drugs use. Just that I believe that it is the current approach, the "war on drugs", that creates and sustains an illegal underground market that encourages people into multiple addictions and puts people into the hands of criminal suppliers who could not care less about the health of their customers so long as the money rolls in. It was recently suggested that the international trade in illicit narcotics is now the world's third largest trading sector, after I think it was financial services and energy. When heroin was legal in this country we had 18 registered addicts in the country - despite it being used in common, over the counter, drugs such as cough syrups. Make it illegal and we have seen the level of addition soar exponentially.

This is a long considered and pragmatic position, that agrees with many professionals in the fields both of law enforcement and drug treatment. Basically, that the current system, based on criminal enforcement, puts far more people in danger from drugs - it makes it easier to peddle to children, because the peddlars are unseen and uncontrolled (and sometimes children in the schoolyard themselves). It creates the core of gang and gun culture. It makes it harder to seek help when, in doing so, you have to out yourself as a criminal.

From Colombia to Croxteth, Afghanistan to the Aylesbury Estate, more people die because of the criminal networks engaged in the drugs trade than from the drugs themselves. Our politicians know this and continue to pursue the obviously failed "war on drugs" strategy because it is a populist one that's sure to get some people huffing and puffing and voting for them - don't fall for it - they are nothing short of accessories to murder! We need a mature debate about these immoral laws (any law that actually colludes in and creates the environment that breeds killings in our communities is an immoral law).

Nonetheless, as the desperate Labour party scaremongers know, my theoretical position on drugs is not one that has much relevance in the role of a city councillor, which is why we Lib Dems have decided not to rise to this astonishing personal attack, marring as it does what has been a reasonably well conducted campaign so far, and concentrate on the positive things we wish to do within the remit of the city council. I do not want any more people, and predominantly younger people as many of the victims of the current drugs system are, dying because of a populist and immoral set of laws that create more problems than they fix.

Now, perhaps you will stick around a bit and read up on my positive ideas for the pressing problems on which Oxford City Council could have an influence, such as affordable housing, and partnership working to bring a bit of business sense and community ownership into the management and development of community owned assets - in the process, I hope, giving more opportunities to people to do something fruitful with their lives and leisure time and not get onto drugs in the first place!