Way back, on April 9th 2005, I attended one of Peter Yu’s many excellent conferences: “W(h)ither the Middleman?”

It was a fun event, packed with many of cyberlaw’s rockstars.

I was on the last panel of day two, looking at ‘the future of intermediaries’ along with a great line-up that included Ann Bartow, Rob Heverly, Dan Hunter and David Post.

For me, the most inspiring of the talks during the two day event was the one given by Ann. She took the question posed in the conference title seriously, choosing to remove the bracketed-h and explaining why gender equality requires us to wither the ‘man’ in the middle. The publication deriving from this talk is available here, and I highly recommend it as an important diagnostic and prescription for the way we use (and don’t use) the web.