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What a bugger. San Pellegrino belongs to Nestle. Did you know that? Are they proud enough to put their logo on the bottle? Are they bollox. Indeed even their original bottled water, Vittel, is only discoverable as a Nestle product by the tiniest of tiny small print on the bottle. But San Pellegrino drinkers do not even get that warning.

Now, this is not a Nestle rant. There are lots of reasons why I try not to consume Nestle products as is my right as a consumer. And I'm not trying to force people to do likewise, merely exercising that consumer right on my own behalf.

So, I know Volvic and Buxton are Coke; Perrier, Vittel and San Pellegrino now are Nestle; Highland Spring is the Makhtoums' I understand. And I steer clear as a result of all of them. The stuff that comes out of my tap is owned by German investors who are about to flog it to whoever wants it, but not the people it belongs to.

Water, water everywhere but not an ethical drop to drink.

I need a friend with a borehole or the Duke of Marlborough to do some better marketing so Blenheim water is on some shop shelves rather than just corporate sales. Otherwise I am utterly dependent on global multi-brands for the very stuff of life.

Congratulations.

If any of the naysayers come across to Rome I may have to leave. One arrogant Messianic prick was nearly enough to make me leave.

Just by way of another brief interlude in my self-imposed blog silence while I am upgrading software and design, I wanted to mention the wonderful speech I heard yesterday. One of the nice things about being one of the university's governors is that I can get to choose to go to pretty well any number of graduation ceremonies. I don't avail myself of the privilege terribly often, but I went yesterday evening to the graduation ceremony for most of our law students.

The honorary graduand was Clive Stafford Smith, the British born US based death-row lawyer and campaigner against the death penalty and torture and all things Guantanamo. As I understand it, he is, like many passionate campaigners, if not many lawyers, not terribly well remunerated, to put it mildly. His clients tend, almost by definition, to be amongst the poorest, often least educated in US society, and they have no legal right to representation once the sentence is handed down. There's not a lot of money in death penalty appeals or sticking up for the disappeared in America's network of secret GTMO-like prisons.

So he was appealing for these bright young starry eyed graduates to come and be exploited by his charity, Reprieve, for a few months, or more precisely, their parents to fund them while they are there. He promised an experience the like of which they are unlikely to find in a whole career at the Old Bailey or the corridors of corporate power. While they may dream of millionaire partnerships at Clifford Chance, he does it because it is fun! You cannot imagine the fantastic feeling you get, he says, when you "whip George Bush's ass in the Supreme Court" and defeat the world's only super-power in their own courts.

And when you think about it, how do we measure success? Is it the money? Or perhaps the satisfaction of a David victorious against Goliath.

You know what it's like, when you haven't been sat on your arses listening to the blather from the podium, you've been trying to remain upright enough to sort out the world in the conference bar.

So now it's all over, if you're travelling back passing anywhere within range of Oxford today, why not call in and help ensure that Nathan Pyle gets elected to the city council?

I myself failed dismally this morning for which I am still trying to work out how to apologise - having said I would do some good mornings, after delivering eve of polls last night and thinking I was getting to bed early enough to get up and five I slept right through my alarms at both 5am and 7am.

Since I am at work, the best way to put this right for me I guess is to encourage you all, freshly inspired by your week away, to spend an hour or so here on your way home. You know it's better than a Welcome Break.

From FlockTogether it's the only thing on today so there are no excuses. Catherine Bearder is the contact but more details on FlockTogether above.

I blogged the other day about my skepticism about the suggestion that the internet needs "governing" by bureaucrats and politicians out there in the "real world". The internet without such governance has provided a way for many more people to express themselves to a wider audience than they ever could have done in physical media. And having given it some more thought I can only conclude that any attempt to impose outside governance on it in the past has been counterproductive.

The BBC reports today from Athens that an Internet bill of rights [is] proposed

See, it's not like the existing charters of rights are upheld in respect of the "real world". Even by some of the "better countries" in the world, like the ones who recently decided that they could define what torture meant in the Geneva Conventions.

Many years ago now, in lawless Finland, there was a fantastic service called "anon@penet.fi". Some chap had been very clever and come up with a mechanism where people who did not want their identity revealed for whatever reason could register and his servers would automatically anonymize anything the user posted to email or usenet. It was very useful. People who were scared of "outing" themselves, people making controversial political points, whistle-blowing on employers or others, used it.

Then the FBI saw something they thought illegal from a poster and demanded to have the logs so that they could match Penet's client users with their supposedly anonymous posts. Rather than give in, I seem to recall he destroyed the database. An early attempt to police or govern the web had resulted in an ingenious facility that could nowadays be being used by dissidents from countries who are scant respecters of human rights, just those countries and practices that the "Internet Governance Forum" is now highlighting, to safely spread word about their countries and bring forward the day those regimes were exposed and changed their ways, closing down for everyone.

But forget China and Syria. The UN is utterly unable to enforce human rights as it is in such regimes. Why does it imagine it can do so by "governing" the internet? Indeed, if you know of IndyMedia in London, you'll realise that the FBI are just as bad - raiding and seizing with the collusion of British police and the Home Office a bunch of servers that happen to highlight news issues that are often, shall we say, uncomfortable for western governments.

Let the geeks get on with finding ways around these attempts to silence us and leave governance to the anarchic but massively people skewed internet itself. Every attempt so far has been heavy handed and counter-productive.