Comments on the draft.

        I have learned about the working draft only today and i'm sending 
this comment in emergency. Please excuse my english. 

	First, making this kind of change in an organization like the W3C 
should be discussed heavily. The first thing to do is to extend the deadline 
for the discussion process. The recent terrorist attack on the United States 
have made all of us focus on other things.

       The nineties brought us unprecedented growth in part because people 
were able to communicate in a free and cheap way. The use of public 
standards was the main engine of this revolution. It allowed evryone to 
build standard compliant systems and devices. It allowed competition in the 
marketplace. It allowed innovations, and it allowed people to access theses 
innovations by paying a fair price. 

       Moreover, using free standard is not a threat to business. Some  
companies already make people pay to use services which are delivered by  
standard communication media. This use of public standard makes their 
services accessible to all users without discrimination, thus helping them 
to reach a big market.  

       Some companies may want to patents protocol in order to kill the 
competition. This will allow them to charge the price they want without fear 
of the competition. This will be them the privilege to earn a tax on  behalf 
of people free speech. And in general, businesses will not benefit from 
this. They will suffer more. They will be forced to pay an undue tax to some 
companies. They will repercut the price on their customers who will be 
reluctant to buy their devices due to high prices. 

       In most countries, the nineties have shown a sharp decline in taxes 
imposed by the states. And this has been good to the economy. Do we have 
made such a progress to go back ? Remember that state taxes were used for 
welfare, defense and security. Even with this inefficient system, the people 
had a return on investment on his taxes. But if i have to pay a tax to 
Philips, Microsoft, Sun or HP, what will i get in return ? This will not be 
a tax in fact, this will be criminals stealing money legally. 

      More and more people are away of closed standard drawbacks and stay 
away from them. This draft will only mislead people and makes they believe 
they use an open W3C backed protocol while they are using a closed W3C 
backed protocol. 

	     Franck Coppola
	     President of PROLOGIN

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PROLOGIN
France's national computer science contest
14 - 16 Rue Voltaire
94 270 Kremlin Bicetre
France