If you thought the UK?s RIP bill looked ominous, check this out. The world’s leading industrialised states opened a cybercrime conference this Monday with a call to prevent lawless ?digital havens? from springing up around the globe?French Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement, addressing officials from the Group of Eight (G8) nations and private industry, has urged countries to agree on a world convention on cybercrime and to harmonise their laws to crack down on hackers, virus writers, software pirates and other Internet fraudsters. Drawing a parallel to international measures against tax havens that hide hot funds and launder money, Chevenement said a cybercrime convention being drawn up by the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe should become a global treaty.?The idea is to produce a global text so there cannot be digital havens or Internet havens,? he said. In his speech, Chevenement rejected the idea of an international ?cyberpolice? apparently supported by U.S. officials. European nations will come up with their own solutions, he declared. .?Sovereign states can develop the capacity to act, first at home and then in international cooperation.? But whilst in theory this sounds like a positive move for Europe, attempting to hold on to its independence from the States, draconian moves like RIP in the UK have shown increasingly how badly wrong European net legislation is going. When French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said in a message to the conference that ?freedom is the most precious gift the Internet brings us,? he was certainly right. ?All states should fight the digital divide between high-tech haves and have-nots,? he said. Very good. But here?s the catch. At the same time, we should ?restrain the excesses of an  unfettered freedom.? See, unfortunately for us, Europe does not have a high enough quotient of gung-ho libertarians to make sure that freedom stays put. We?ll always worry about the ?excesses of unfettered freedom?, which in itself is no bad thing. But when you?ve got Brussels legislating to account for those excesses, and rejecting expert advice from the US, you know things are going to get messy. Real messy.