French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been holding a forum in Paris on May 24-25, ahead of the G8 conference that will start on Thursday 26th May in Deauville.

The forum, dubbed the e-G8, focuses on the future of the Web and its sovereignty and brings together the biggest names in Internet business and new media, including Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, News Corp's Rupert Murdoch and Google's Eric Schmidt, Deutsche Welle reported.

Amongst the main issues addressed during the conference were the regulation of the World Wide Web, privacy and copyright, and net neutrality.

Critics said that some countries are going in the direction of restricting Internet freedoms and handing the net control to companies and governments, going against the principle of the net neutrality (which is a principle that advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers or governments on consumers' access to networks that participate in the internet).

President Nicolas Sarkozy, in his opening speech, said that governments still had a lot to learn from the Internet, which helps reinforce democracy, solidarity and social dialogue; but on the other hand, he also stressed the role of governments in regulating the excesses of the Internet and enforce rules in the digital world -- even as they need to foster creativity and economic growth with the Internet, NPR reported.

"I was glad to hear President Sarkozy say at his talk that the government does not own the Internet," said Jeff Jarvis, a professor of new media at the City University of New York, quoted by Deutsche Welle. "But nonetheless he is claiming sovereignty over regulating the Internet, and getting the G8 to do so. There's danger there."

"The best protection for the Internet is its open and distributed structure, and we need to leave it that way," Jarvis said.

Google's chairman Eric Schmidt said: "Before we decide that we need a regulatory solution to these problems, lets ask 'Is there a technological solution that can scale, that can work globally and mover very quickly? ' Because we'll move more quickly than any one of the governments", the Telegraph reported.

Sources: Deutsche Welle, NPR, Telegraph