According to a new study by a San Francisco-based marketing firm, the network that was once the exclusive domain of U.S. academics and military researchers now hosts as many users who are not native English speakers as those who are. A research group based in the Netherlands says that the non-English number would be even higher if European phone companies would stop charging tolls for local calls and venture capitalists in Europe would invest in local Web companies.

Nevertheless, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will elect officers this fall by continent in a conscious effort to reduce U.S. influence, and the Internet Engineering Task Force is considering the adoption of an alphabet with accent marks and non-Roman characters. The European Union is attacking weak U.S. Internet privacy laws and soccer coverage is improving steadily.

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