Did you know that Canada’s Internet is democratically governed? The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), is a non-profit organization that manages the dot-ca registry and addresses many of the day-to-day challenges facing the Internet in Canada.

Every year, CIRA holds elections and, just like electing a politician to represent your views about how the country should be run, you can elect the CIRA board to represent your views about how the country's Internet should be run.

These elections are important. CIRA has considerable resources that could be put more forcefully towards ensuring Canadians have open and affordable options for Internet access. This year four places on CIRA’s board are up for election.

Representatives of more than 190 governments begin a profoundly important 12-day closed-door meeting in Dubai on Monday to hammer out how the Internet should be run and who should pay for its operation.

The International Telecommunication Union, a low-profile United Nations agency that's sponsoring the meeting, sets out the technical standards for the world's communication technologies, and the last time the group met was in 1988, when the information superhighway was geek talk and the World Wide Web didn't exist. The Internet's subsequent explosive growth occurred not so much because of the ITU but despite it.

Opponents of the Gitxsan Treaty Society spent Monday preparing themselves for arrest. For much of the day, Gitxsan community members crowded at one end of Omineca Street before the Gitxsan Treaty Society offices while police assembled a block away.

The day had a strange character. A hot, sunny day in the north, people set up lawn chairs, visited friends and family, and wandered down the block to buy ice cream. Children played on the sidewalk, while elders sat and talked. However, beneath the conviviality of community life lay deep-seated tensions.