David Smith is the Observer's technology correspondent
The sound of a thousand laptops snapping shut must mean the UN's first Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has come to an end.
More than 1,500 delegates from governments, businesses and interest groups around the world came to Athens to chew the cud over where the net goes from here.
This was very different from a UN security council passing resolutions or imposing sanctions. The IFG chairman, Nitin Desai, began his summing up this morning: "It's not possible to speak of anything as a product of this meeting. We are not trying to come at some agreement or conclusion."
So another example of all talk and no action? You can judge for yourself from the session transcripts at intgovforum.org.
On the plus side, people have not got bogged down in interminable debates about the wording of articles and clauses. One session moderator described it as "a giant experiment and a giant brainstorming."
More importantly, disparate groups have been obliged to come face to face. Many delegates savoured the unlikely spectacle of Amnesty International, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, the BBC and officials from China all in the same room.
Today, Amnesty presented Mr Desai with a petition of 50,000 names in support of irrepressible.info, its joint campaign with The Observer calling for an end to online repression. Twenty activists from Amnesty's Greek branch wore green ties and put green loudspeakers to their mouths as Dan McQuillan, Amnesty's delegation leader, read aloud the campaign pledge for freedom of speech on the internet.
Outside, perhaps by coincidence, Microsoft's Fred Tipson was spotted deep in conversation with officials from the Internet Society of China. During the week, companies such as Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems have attempted to defend their operations in China and elsewhere, not always convincingly.
Amnesty said it was pleased that human rights has been one of dominant issues at the IGF. The organisation argues that, just because the internet is new, "we don't have to reinvent the wheel": a framework already exists in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Freedom of speech depends on having a voice in the first place, and the IGF discussed the challenge of connecting the 5 billion people who are currently without internet access. Less than 4% of people in Africa can get online and just 0.1% have broadband access. This afternoon, one panelist made an impassioned speech pointing that the social networking site MySpace means little to teenagers in Lagos because they lack "access to access", which only deepens global divisions. The conference heard that internet traffic between North and South America is 60 times more expensive than that between London and New York.
The presence of mobile phone companies Nokia and Motorola, which say they are building the networks and devices to spread internet use in the developing world, might have been welcome here.
Moves toward a multilingual net to protect minority languages and cultures were championed by the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium. It was argued that, "like biodiversity, the internet must reflect the whole spectrum of human endeavour both past and future". But some experts warn that experiments with non-Latin characters in domain names could jeopardise the stability of the net, causing it to break up into incompatible parts.
Meanwhile, there were dissenting voices this morning from Iran and South Africa, complaining that they were not invited on to the panels of the main sessions. But bloggers around the world have been invited to join in.
The Greek hosts faced embarrassing reports that the country arrested a blogger for linking to a satirical web page last week. Its venue, the Divani Apollo Palace, also suffered regular WiFi service failures under pressure from eagerly surfing delegates, as described by one frustrated blogger. The IGF's own website crashed yesterday because of a traffic overload.
This morning, Lithuania and Azerbaijan made their pitches to host the 2010 event, but next year it will be in Rio. Not that membership of the IGF's advisory group is all glamour. Mr Desai said their tasks had included "pushing chairs around, xeroxing things, getting coffee for somebody et cetera, et cetra."
