Like any self-respecting reader, I have a healthy collection of books, and consequently, an overflowing bookcase. I also live in Bombay, where every enemy of books - heat, humidity, dust, shortage of space - exists in abundance. As a result, half my library rests in a quiet corner in my mother's apartment in Madras, waiting for the day when they can finally claim a place of their own in my home. I try to keep my books well, without tears, creases, folds, dog-ears or any form of marking. Given that much of my reading takes place on the trains and stations of Bombay's local train system, this is far from easy to do, especially when one hand is occupied in desperately holding on to an available support for the duration of the commute. My success rate at book maintenance stands at about 40 per cent.

This past weekend, the Financial Express carried a column I wrote about the decoupling of ICANN from the US Department of Commerce's purview. In an act of shameless self-promotion, I shall now highlight the points I made in that article:

• If the Internet is an international entity, then it should be administered by an equally international body. The Obama administration's move to accept this truth is a marked deviation from the Bush era, and a move in the right direction.
• It is important to note that this move can create serious issues of both internationalization and localization of the Internet, particularly from the perspectives of scale and security. Many of these issues have already been raised by ICANN, but moving forward, a global perspective will certainly help to ensure that they will be addressed.
• It is not in anybody's interest to make the Internet an auction site for top level domains, and the rest of the world is perfectly capable of ensuring that frivolous domains are not turned into a money-making machine for ICANN and domain registrars. In other words, don't expect .sport or .cola to come into existence anytime soon.
• Unicode URLs are the route to making the Internet truly global, but aforementioned security issues need to be addressed and loopholes preempted. Once again, it's a grown-up world, and they can handle the pressure.
• Finally, the Internet gets to be truly international in almost all aspects. This means the European and Asian representatives on ICANN's Governmental Advisory Council now have to show that they can step up and shoulder the burden of shaping the Internet's future.

Thanks to Anand for passing on the contact, and Nikhil for going on vacation.

Long before the Gibson Guitar Corporation put his name on a solid-body electric guitar, Les Paul was a legendary innovator in music, beating Bob Dylan to the neck-worn harmonica and designing and recording on a prototype multi-track recording system. But a block of wood known as 'The Log' is what made him so much more than an excellent jazz/country guitarist.