JUNE 14, 2011 8:00 A.M. CST ISOC-INET NEW YORK ****** 9am Opening remarks >> DAVID SOLOMONOFF: Hello I'm David Solonoff President of the Internet Society's New York Chapter. Also we have a, very important, evaluation form in your package. We appreciate your feedback. It helps us to (inaudible) bigger and better. First, I'm going to introduce Sally Wentworth, the regional bureau director for North America and the senior manager for public policy for the Internet Society. Prior to joining the Internet Society in 2009, she was the assistant director for telecommunications and information policy in the office of science and technology policy at the White House. Then prior to that,she was a policy advisor on Internet policy at the department of state. >> SALLY SHIPMAN WENTWORTH: Thank you, David, and thank you for coming. I welcome you on behalf of the Internet Society to INET New York, INET North America. I wanted to take a quick moment and ask the audience to see how many of you for whom this is your first Internet Society event. Wow. We want to welcome you to the Internet Society. We hope this day gives you a very good sense of the global Internet Society, the work that we are doing, the mission that we are advancing, and also introduce you to our New York chapter. The Internet Society has presence all over the world, and we try to take action through local communities, and our New York chapter is really one of our great chapters in the Internet Society, I want to thank David, Evan, other members of the society of the New York chapter that helped make this event possible. We are a nonprofit organization, we were founded in 1992 to advance the cause of the open Internet around the world. We fundamentally believe that the Internet is good and it works to the benefit of users. The discussion that we are going to have today is focused on a choice that the Internet Society believes that we are about to make that the Internet is at a crossroads, but the future of the Internet depends upon this notion of innovation at the edge, that the user can impact the future of the Internet. But we believe that a number of the decisions that people are making, whether it's users or business or governments can really impact the ability of the Internet to continue to grow and develop in an open fashion. So that's what the New York INET is intended to discuss. We have a lot of wonderful speakers today. We hope that you will participate, there will be opportunities for Q and A. There is a back panel feed for questions, and we really hope that this is a participatory discussion, that is the Internet Society. It's an opportunity for participation. So with that, I'm going to show you a brief video about the Internet Society, to give you a little bit more background since we do have a lot of new members here in the audience, and then I'll conclude. >> (Video:) Ever wonder what the Internet will be like 20 years from now, imagine (inaudible) 20 years ago how people use the Internet today (inaudible) (no audio.) At the core how we work, how we learn, how we live. The Internet today (inaudible) families use it (inaudible) students use it to learn and neighbors use it to connect (inaudible) organizations use it to bring people together, and companies from nearly every industry across every continent use the Internet to connect with customers (inaudible) (sorry, I hear the background music but not the words.) The Internet Society brings together tens of thousands of individuals like you (inaudible) committed to keep the Internet open, shared (inaudible) global Internet Society is a community (inaudible) technology, policy and education that are key to the Internet's continued success. (Inaudible) promote technical (inaudible) social equality and economic development. Join the Internet Society. >> SALLY SHIPMAN WENTWORTH: I think that most of you have already joined the Internet Society. The next step is to be empowered and to take action, discuss, participate today. We have a good program. We hope you walk away feeling inspired to continue this mission and your local community. Thank you very much. (Applause) >> DAVID: I'd like to introduce Rachel Sterne, Chief Digital Officer of New York City. (Applause) >> RACHEL STERNE: Thank you so much, David. Thank you, Sally, and everyone. Welcome to New York City. This is an enormous honor to be here today, for such an incredibly important conversation and discussion, and really looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say. To frame everything a little bit before our very exciting keynote speaker starts, I'd like to speak a little bit about New York City's digital strategy, and to give a little bit of context to some of this discussion in terms of how here in New York City, we are looking at these evaluations. I'll speak shortly about that, and of course the context that none of this would even be possible without the innovation that, of the individuals who are here today. As a quick background, I recently started with the City of New York and the mayor three weeks ago unveiled his roadmap for the digital cities, which looks at comprehensively and wholistically where New York City is in terms of connecting New Yorkers and allowing them to connect with each other, delivering services, and where we hope to be. The report that the mayor presented was divided into three parts, the first part looks at where are we today, the second part looks at what could we be doing better, and the third part examines what is our plan to get there. The first part it was really thrilling to see that we are actually in a very, in a great place to begin. New York City through digital channels alone reaches over 4 million unique individuals a month. That is 2.8 million on NYC.gov, the city's Website and another 1.2 million through social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and E-mail newsletters. On NYC.gov which has nearly a million pages, all told, across the city, the city's department of information technology and telecommunications and very excited to see that the city's chief information officer and commissioner, that department is here today maintains a 99.99 percent uptime rate and does a phenomenal job of supporting all these digital endeavors. The city has 200 social media channels and 100 individuals who are, their day- to-day job is making sure that they are using these tools to effectively connect with their constituents. To give examples of the ways the city is using information technology and digital media to unlock information and put power and control in the hands of New Yorker, the department of buildings introduced (inaudible) any time a New Yorker, and New Yorkers always want more information, maybe a construction site where they have a few questions, they can hold up their smart phone, they can read the QR code and get the full history of the person who is managing the site, prior violations and a phone number to call them if they are interested. In addition, the mayor's office at NYC mayor's office on Twitter holds a weekly initiative called Ask Mike, using the hash tag Ask Mike, that encourages New Yorkers to ask questions of the mayor. And every Friday he responds to questions on the weekly radio show breaking down barriers and creating a direct line of communication. In addition, again at the city's IT agency, the geospatial information services team has created phenomenal resource in the 311 service request map so that is a map that is maintained by the city, that is updated on a regular basis to provide complete transparency and account ability for the city's efforts. It does it by providing over 15 different types of service requests, which are essentially 311 complaints and things that New Yorkers want to be resolved. They overlay this on a map divided up by community boards and it shows here are the number of requests, here is what has been filed in the past five days and creates a fantastic tool for accountability for citizens. Then again on the lighter side we see that the Department of Health has created, or sorry, the Department of Transportation created tumbler blog called the daily pothole that tracks also with great transparency how many potholes are fixed that weekend and shows on a map how these things are being fixed. This is a sample. In addition, one of the most fascinating and impressive achievements of the city is the open data initiative. This includes the New York City data mines which is maintained by do it by the city's IT agency, provides nearly 400 open data sets that developers are able to use to create applications, tools, features, etcetera, and to market and incentivize individuals to use these data sets, the city has created the NYC big apps competition, which is sponsored by BMIW ventures, so 40 plus thousand dollars in prize money that is provided every month or every year is essentially at little or no cost to taxpayers. Some of the results that we have seen from this is the road app that enables New Yorkers to report in realtime their social transit experience, for example, you can find out ahead of time if your subway line is running a little behind, if there is a free parking spot nearby, or even if there is traffic on the road. That is a great example because it's not just user generated, it's pulling from Department of Transportation information. It is pulling from the MTA and it's pulling from Google transit. It shows the advantage there. The last example from the NYC competition is the Don't Eat There application, which was another winner which integrates with 4 square a location sharing platform, so that if you check into a restaurant in New York City, and that restaurant may be in danger of being shut down because of health code violations, you immediately get an alert on your phone. It lets you know that maybe you want to reconsider that choice. In addition to that, the city has a 98 percent residential broadband access rate, and has just surpassed Boston to become number 2 in venture funding nationally. By all these different indices, New York City is in a phenomenal position. But as New Yorkers we are never going to rest on our laurels and we are going to continue to innovate. As part of the investigation and evaluation we ask New Yorkers what do they want? What are they not yet seeing that we could be doing a better job of in New York City government. Number one was Internet access and in many different forms, people wanted wi-fi on the subways, and in public transports, people were interested in greater broadband connectivity, when we were talking to businesses, many of them wanted greater broadband connectivity, faster broadband connectivity so that they could ramp up what they are doing. Also on the business side, engineering talent, was a major request. After evaluating all these different input points and we had over 4,000 points of input both through in-person meetings, through meet us, through workshops and tools like Twitter and Facebook and tumbler, we developed wholistically as a city a digital roadmap that centers on four pillars access, open government, engagement and industries. We believe that in order to fully realize the city's digital potential we need to focus on all these things at once because they are so interrelated. The city is one of the recipients of the broad band technology opportunity program and through do it and Department of Education will be bringing nearly 80,000 individuals broadband Internet access, based starting out with 6th graders receiving cash assistance which enables them to get broad band at home, training they need. Every branch of library in New York City has wi-fi that will be supported and expanded. And the city continues to support public/private partnerships that bring wi-fi to more public spaces, and last week AT&T joined the mayor to announce wi-fi Internet access in 20 parks. We saw earlier Dumbo is getting wi-fi. In the open government space, the city is doing a phenomenal job. The next steps, the do it is taking the lead on, is that we will be introducing an API. In addition to these data sets, we will be unveiling an API that enables developers to create apps that are constantly up to date and receiving realtime feeds and also expand that to 311, the city's customer service platforms that helps individuals navigate all of these different, all of the many different city agencies, and that is another way that the city will be decentralizing and unlocking the potential of New York City as a platform. This will be called New York City platform to reflect that. Finally with engagement we are bringing greater coordination internally to those 100 plus social media managers, etcetera and also introducing one-stop shops on Twitter, Facebook, 4 square tumbler that for instance, incentivize New Yorkers to visit more public spaces. Lastly in the industry section there is enormous amounts the city's economic development corporation does. I'm sure if you are from New York you are familiar with this, and they will be continuing to build on that with more affordable work spaces in the Bronx and Brooklyn and with the plan to issue an RFP for a new or expanded applied sciences facility in New York City. We believe that by cultivating that next generation of engineers, that is going to provide the talent pool that the city needs to continue to support these innovations. Thank you for allowing me to share with you some of that. Now it's my great great honor to invite to the stage Sir Tim Berners-Lee. (Applause.) I'll do a quick introduction as I'm sure you are impatient as I am to hear what he has to say. Again here at the city, our goal is to use this technology to use digital technology to connect New Yorkers and provide them with services and information that they need, and essentially none of this would have been possible without the inventions of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Back in 1990 he invented essentially the Worldwide Web. To add a little more context and specificity, that is the first ever web server, first ever URL, first ever html page and link and first ever web browser. Without enabling this level of innovation, truly none of what we are doing today would even be possible. In addition to this, he is the director of the Worldwide Web consortium, W3C, founder of the worldwide web foundation, senior researcher and holder of (inaudible) MIT computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory, director of web science trust. In April 2009 he was elected as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences based in Washington, D.C. I'm incredibly humbled and honored to introduce you to Sir Tim Berners-Lee. (Applause.) >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: So thank you all for coming. Thanks for inviting me. I spent I suppose certain amount of my time answering this question: What sort of Internet do I want. In fact people who didn't ask the question, what sort of Internet they should be fighting for. Vint and I have been doing this sort of thing sometimes on the same stages, and so often (inaudible) our opinions about what is appropriate Internet (inaudible) people need to know. It's nice to address it as the main topic today. Let me go back to explain where I'm coming from. Back in 1989, I was frustrated because I wasn't actually employed to develop the worldwide web or anything; I was employed to do various software projects. But I was doing them with people who worked in different parts of the world, and collaborated together. Internet was recently becoming available and usable in Europe without people saying isn't that some American thing, shouldn't you be using protocols (inaudible) the very common situation, sitting there in a large European lab (inaudible) I may have a piece in front of me but I know it's being produced on computer. Know there is a file somewhere going out on a disk and the disk is on the computer and the computer is on some kind of network. The Internet people have done a good job of tying these networks together. Probably the network I'm on is connected to that computer, and in principle I should be able to find that document but I can't. Maybe I've got some obscure ways of going over the various networks and logging on to a computer and running some program, learning how to run the program, accessing data on it and maybe I'll be able to read it on my screen or maybe I'll be able to get it back. If I do get it back, it won't be, it will be certainly a format I can't use. As a user, I sat there with this problem. As a user of the Internet, I decided that it could be fixed fairly straightforwardly by imagining all these documentation systems were in fact part of one imaginary documentation system which existed in a space, URL space. That URL is a different thought, we need a new protocol for various reasons, called HTP, like FTP but different. But all the STP things would be part of the space. So it's a question of imagining the space, defining the URLs and writing the HTP protocol which was simple in those days, and find lingua franca html, as I wrote the code. It was easy in those days. You have no idea how easy it is to do standards when there is only one of you. Nobody breathed down my neck at all. Nobody (inaudible) one guy said go ahead and do it. So when I did that, I set the server running on one machine and go to any other machine, the Internet, run my browser program and type in the URL, and the browser would go on to the network, use domain name system, which did for a long time, and it would open TCP, exist 20 years before that, Vint and colleagues and because Vint's colleagues when they made IP and TCP, made a good platforms something which is solid but has no opinion about what you build on it, just a flat, because they made an open platform, then I could write programs without asking them, asking anybody involved, without asking anybody who was around 20 years before or any organization put into process afterwards. That is because of the way the Internet was designed. My goal with the web was the same thing, design the web to be an open platform. HTTP doesn't tell you how you design a Website or what you have behind it. Is it a file-server, a map, is it something which is interactive, are all the Web pages created randomly by a program or is a huge amount of storage behind it, all that was completely undefined by the http protocol so the web is another platform. The reason it's the Internet has been a great platform for the web, the reason the web has been a great platform for other things, it is open, there is nobody centrally controlling what innovations happens, and because also, there haven't been (inaudible) this was an Internet days, that was assumed, during the web days, people ask the question, and the gopher system, another Internet based systems, one point, the University of Minnesota owned the IPR, for the software, at one point said, not today but some day (inaudible) not for academia but for industry we might possibly charge a small fee. It would be taking off like this and people dropped it because (inaudible) in many spaces people in their garages and people in (inaudible) once you have read the gopher code, now you pollute it (inaudible) claim that anything else you write in the future has been inspired by the software that you read and so that you are now a legal liability. So getting it relatively free is really important. So that is a big part of what I think is important about the ongoing Internet, and it's in W3C, we entrained it where four years after starting the web it became necessary to start this consortium to deal with the very, need for rapid standardization as people rapidly developed web technology, web standards, design with a lot of clues out of the IGF book of engineering standards, task force, working groups modeled after W3Cs. And so that if you like then is my history, the invention, in 1990, W3C, still director of it, is now, has got like the ITF no shortage of things to discuss. Currently for example, html 5 is being discussed. It has just gone through what we call last call in the ITF, in W3C. There is the web data and lots of things that are exiting and go to (inaudible). What sort of Internet we want, so certainly, I want the Internet (inaudible) when I made the first web server, first web client, very important that it's open to innovation. It's also important that it should be open (inaudible) originally I suppose important to (inaudible) geek want to invent something, you are interested in who do I have to ask. In fact, to get to (inaudible) I have to ask somebody, pretty happy running 2784 which was one you didn't have to ask permission for, 2784 was my parents' phone number. AT is much easier to (inaudible) but in general, now it's not just, the openness of the Internet is not just for geeks. Now we got to the stage where the Internet is used in such intimate ways, the use of the web, information space is so ubiquitous, and it happens when people are getting the reaction where when you ask them a question, if they can't remember, they turn to the keyboard, or the drawer of the hand-held device to, I can Google that, so much built into the way we do things, so much the way we do business, actually getting to the point that we need to preserve the openness because it's fundamental property as society. Those things which in this country, who is American, who is a U.S. citizen? Who is not a U.S. citizen? In country, some of the things, probably society, people go back to the constitution, say the founder of the constitution, they felt that these things were self-evident, some of them. That means they couldn't explain why they felt (inaudible) these are properties we want in a society, the congress can't go around forbidding this sort of thing. They can't just put you in jail without a trial and they can't stop you gathering together in groups. Now a lot of that translates, a lot of that stuff turns on the Internet. When you gather together as a group, it's a group you found on the web, that you made on a Website. In fact, so much happens on the web that if you look at somebody who has got Internet access and has access to the web, and is actually a participant in the information community, in other words, they are not just using it to watch film, they are maybe blogging, maybe they are voting, they are actually being, they are using it to do things, they are using it for business. They are using it for essential social relationships. Then the difference between the capacity empowerment of that person, the person who's not got access to that is now huge, so that now we are talking about another dimension to the difference between the haves and have-nots. And I used to think it was sort of arrogant to talk about, put that right up there with water and vaccinations and things like that. But now if you actually look at what it takes to enable somebody in a rural village, how somebody in a minority could get a job, somebody has to stay at home with the kids to be able to get a job, then it turns out, water is important and healthcare is important and people talk about those human rights, after things like not being in prison and so on, but just as not being imprisoned is as important, actually if you were to take somebody, take a family, cut it off completely from the Internet, the effect to the teenagers would be devastating, the effect on the mom's income would be devastating, the effect on the safety of the grandparents who need to have, need to be able to use some alarm system to call for help, if they get stuck, there are so many ways. For homework you can make a list of the ways in which internet is really critical at home and play. There are so many of them. I'm not going to list them, but it gets to the point where now I'm proposing we should start talking about the rights to connect, the right to be part of the Internet, information society as a human right. So as I say, we formed 1994, standards body, industry group, you can join it as an individual, as a small company or big company, and it does standards. Little while, couple years ago, we were looking at what the various organizations were doing, realizing the end goal was the web should serve humanity. Coming up with that, as a mission statement, all these things we are trying to do, try to serve humanity. The moment you look at that, unlike in the early days when there is only a few people using the web, now when you look at the web, and you realize that 20 percent of the population of the planet use the Worldwide Web, then apart from thinking that is cool, what a lot of people, there is a new question which you didn't ask before. That is what about the other 80 percent? Suddenly the other 80 percent is within range, within reach. Suddenly there are whole pieces, where does that 80 percent come from? You might think I'm lucky, I'm in a big city, but there must be 80 percent of the people who live out there in some jungle, all these people live in a jungle, they don't have access to Internet, do they, because there is no cell towers out there, no fiber out there. We are actually wrong. No. There is only 20 percent who don't have signals. The 20 percent of people in the world, where if you were at their home with your phone you wouldn't be able to make a phone call. For most people, they have actually got signals. What is wrong? Why aren't they using the web? Is it that they have a signal but they haven't got a phone? Or is it that they got a phone, it's the $10 basic Africa brick phone from Nokia and doesn't have a web browser on it because they are waiting for the new one which hopefully will have is a web browser. Or is that they have a web browser but nobody explained what the web thing is or why it would be useful, or did somebody explain to them it would be useful and showed them how to get on and they did get a phone with a web browser, and they found out there wasn't anything useful on it because actually they don't, their native language isn't represented at all. Or is it because when they go in there, they found stuff in native languages being translated by well-meaning people, well-meaning machines, but in fact it's not live because they didn't realize that it's a read/write place, the web is a read/write medium. Nobody told them you don't wait for your village to appear on wikipedia. You put it on wikipedia. You don't wait for it to appear on open street maps. That is useful, put your town on a map. You put it on there yourself. It will be a lot easier for (inaudible) two years ago (inaudible) trying to look at, working with lots of organizations including ISOC, to look at what we can do, what is the smallest things we can do for the other 80 percent which would say, for one large tract of, for Africa, bring people, bring the women who are actually doing the work and doing the farming into situations where they could exchange agricultural information about the blight say ten years earlier than they would otherwise, five years instead of 15 years or in two years instead of eight years. What things could we do? What little examples could we get somebody to set so that the mobile phone aware Website which they built running from their laptop and the company they built using it, which was based on that Website, allows them to really boost up themselves as entrepreneurs and whole story became the stuff of the oral tradition, the stories handed down, anecdotes handed down by anybody who want to start a business, you should get yourself a Website and make sure it works with phones, so all the people in the villages can do business with you and make appointments with you and so on. So, I've added then on the web for all, web foundation, organization I'm involved in (inaudible) response to this question that the web should be available for anybody, not to everybody, don't have to force it to everybody, but to put as many people, capable of putting themselves there. There is one more area which I'm going to emphasize before I wrap up, and it follows, it also follows from the fact that we use the web for so many things. There's always been the assumption, everybody in the Internet circles, that if you buy connection to the Internet at a certain rate for certain quality of service, really fast most of the time and quite fast some of the time, and I do the same thing, I buy connection to the Internet, really fast most of the time, quite fast some of the time, if you have done that and I have done that, then we can communicate, no matter where you are, really fast most of the time and quite fast some of the time. I want to be able to buy lots of different speeds, lots of different types of quality of service, might buy Internet which deliberately has been cooked up so it's going to be good for my Skype conversations, for example. But when I connect, we can connect, do whatever we want to do on it, so it's not going to be depending on, for example, if you are making independent films, maybe you are Greek and making Greek films and I'm in another part of the world, and end of the day and I want to watch good Greek independent film and when I connect, I don't want my Internet service provider to say, whoa, hold on, sorry, yeah, we know you gave your Internet access, but we are also your cable company, and like we give you the movies and this is your list of movies for tonight. Look at it. Great! Thousands of movies you can watch tonight on cable. Okay. So I'm afraid, just now, that we can't, you really talk to those guys, movie server, because that's just, come on, business is business. So that sort of effect is really really, is one of the really really, if that were to happen and every now and again it almost happens, and sometimes it happens a little bit, as it happens and as it starts to happen, then..... (Mumbling.) Delete that. Sorry. Forgive me. (Laughter) You can put it back up. People find it easier to follow the text. Do put it back up. But increase the font size for people whose vision is as bad as mine. So, what you don't want to have happen is the Internet service provider because they have got, they happen to be providing Internet service, they have control over your life. You don't want, you want a film to watch, but that is actually only a little wee worry. The big worries, they subtly find ways of steering you towards a particular religion or particular political party. This thing is used for democracy now. Democracy actually happens largely on the net. Yeah, it happens other places too but mainly it happens on the net. If you can't, just make it seem before the election one candidate's Website is rather slow so everybody thinks they didn't spend enough money on getting connected, so they end up going to other candidate's Website because at least you can read it, or worse, if you can end up mysteriously redirecting people who were going to a candidate's Website to another one or a fake one, weirder things have happened and been done, if you looked at the (inaudible) how Twitter bombing (inaudible) check it out. So control over the, over democracy, obviously, even much more, is much more insidious and horrible but also very lucrative, there is a lot of money, which can't be spent on direct campaign contributions, sure would love to be spent on fixing the Internet for the moment just before polling date to effect a different reality. Maybe there would be a lot of money out there to reflect a different reality, when it comes to science, when it comes to those people who don't believe the results of science and don't want people to read about evolution. Maybe can you imagine an Internet service provider ends up being run by people who don't believe in evolution, so they end up not delivering pages about evolution to school kids. So one of the two things which is really really important about Internet, when you connect, you can connect to whatever speed you pay for, put to wherever you want, that is Internet itself is not filtering. It may be gray glasses, may look like white glasses but it is not colored glasses. You are getting when you look out there now to a large extent people see the world as it is, what they see on the Internet. You really don't want people to be filtering what you can see. The other thing you really don't want is that, as you click, as your teenager, wondering about maybe whether you are gay, or maybe you have a disease, sexually transmitted disease and you don't want to ask any person you know and you are going to go to the web, you don't want, as you are about to click on that, really crucial or lifesaving click, you don't want to think that somebody is going to be recording the click, going to be recording where you are going, they are going to be using inspection technology to build a profile of the house and after you clicked on that, the house will be granted or the house which is worried about sexually transmitted diseases you will be getting all kinds of, family getting all kinds of stuff through the mail that you wouldn't want to see in the mail, and insurance premiums will go up, and people will be exposed to blackmail. So not only do you need to be able to click with complete privacy, you don't want to be spied on. Neutrality. Neutral net. Fight for neutral net. We must also fight against (inaudible) if you find a government tells you they really must spy, in order to fight terrorism, then you have to go and ask them exactly what they set up, checks and balances, who is going to spy on the spiers, because that data about who is doing what on the Internet is just a god-like view on to what is happening in the nation and in the world, which is much too dangerous to treat without free care. Thank you for your attention. (Applause) >> DAVID SOLOMONOFF: Thanks, Sir Tim, for his presentation. And now we are going to take some questions. And we can take them by a back channel, and/or if you raise your hand, we have people with microphones who can come by and -- okay. So over here. >> (Inaudible) apply technology (inaudible) I'd like to know what you think the Internet policy implications are of WikiLeaks and (inaudible) going to have reaction of more Internet kill switch, or it's going to make the Internet's role even bigger? (Pause) >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: (Inaudible) more people abuse the Internet, the more governments will need to and have excuse to try to seek control of it. But looking, so actually, the word you have used bring up a bunch of issues. I'll address some of them. One of the things which it brings up (inaudible) fundamental rights people have out there, right to privacy, the right to free speech and so on. And sometimes these rights are in contradiction to each other. One of the rights we have is the right to know who it is, saying something nasty about you. For example, there are places where anonymity is actually not really appropriate. For example if you come to W3C, join a working group, probably quite often you are working for a company, working for a company which has products involved and you say who you are working for. You put it on the table, say what you are interested and if you are working for two companies, you put that on the table, as a consultant. So that people know where you are coming from. And if within the working group you really are mean to somebody, there is a lot of people going to lean on you, in the bar before the next session and tell that you behavior is inappropriate. So there are all kinds of social systems that rely on people having we feel defined identity. Meanwhile if you talk to anybody who is involved in supporting activists under oppressive regimes, tell they will you that the desperate need for anonymity, that there are many people that we have seen recently, during the recent events in the Middle East, who will actually go out there without anonymity, and raise a flag, say what is going on, and many of them have been killed and tortured. There are, obviously, systems which allow anonymity, which is interesting I gather that the guy who was Google in Egypt and started the Facebook page which many people point to as the initial seed of the Egyptian revolution that (inaudible) took down the groups he was starting because they were started without a well-defined identity and on Facebook you can't do that. So it's interesting, now if you talk to somebody from amnesty international, somebody from Facebook, you will get two points of view. The message is there is no simple answers to the questions you just asked, particularly, a great example case, is anonymity. You have at all times the right to know who it is that is talking to you and the right to be known but the right to be known is actually the only need in dire circumstances under an oppressive regime. But because you don't know when, which regime is going to be oppressive, you have to hear people, mechanisms of blowing whistles under any regime, and we just have to have social constructs maybe involving courts which will eventually judge as to whether in fact, yes, you use anonymity, you pull a major high value card and but if you abused it, I'm sorry, launder a bunch of money from drug smuggling, you lose. Take away that anonymity. It's a tricky balance. We need to develop social institutions to answer this question in specific cases, and think, everybody, about these issues, about where, to what extent, where we are going to put that line between anonymity and accountability. >> We have a back channel question here which I'll do next. The question is from Nick Gall. And the question is: How does net neutrality apply to search results? Much has been recently about filter bubbles, and he has a link to a wikipedia article about that, tailoring of search results by Google being, etcetera, to the searcher. Should that be regulated? >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Well, that is another bunch of connected things. Filter bubble phenomenon was, I think that now is applied to the idea that search engine can get to know you, so it can get to know the things you are interested in, so you will end up in a bubble, because it will, you will reward the search engine. You will go to the search engine, it will feed things you are excited and happy about and won't feed you things which get you thinking. It will allow the bubble and burst your bubble. You will end of (inaudible) you will never understand as a Yankee why the Red Sox were so (inaudible) couple years ago. As an Israeli, you will never understand why (inaudible) so on. There is danger in the bubble also that you just simply, as opposed to have a strange view, there is also danger in the filter bubbles, once you have been bracketed as somebody who buys stuff, the web won't show you the cheap stuff, so you won't believe cheap stuff exists. So that whole, that is an interesting thing. Somebody mentioned the web science trust. One of the, that sort of discussion is very much what I call a Website issue. You have to, when you look at that sort of thing, you have to look at the humanity connected as a system that you have to use a lot of different, have to use sociology, psychology, economics and mathematics and scientific, figure out the web, figure out what the implications of that would be. Good web science question. Go become a web scientist. Go study all the relevant disciplines. Find a university where they are putting Websites openly on the curriculum, and then you will be able to do mathematics to answer questions like that. You always have of course the choice search engine, even though you may not think so. >> When you ask the question, if you can identify yourself. >> Abdullah from college (inaudible) New York. I have two unrelated questions. The first one is on the case of the semantic web what has been achieved and what do you expect that will be achieved in the future. And my second question, is there such a concept as the responsible use of Internet? Of course, it is too broad. I would restrict it to the children and teenagers. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Concept of responsible use of Internet. First one at length, so semantic web is exciting because people understand the web of documents and don't realize how much potential there is in data. Cool thing about City of New York is that when you go there you cannot only learn from the mayor how excited he is that you are living in New York and how excited the future is of New York, you will actually see, you can pull down a CSV file so you compare the number of potholes around your street. I'm not sure but I imagine, typical sort of thing with the city, you can pull down the CSC file, to pull down the number of potholes, to see if your street has more potholes than anybody else's street; the economic level of the city, versus other cities. The data on the web, there is high standing form of it is called link a data, when you put data on a web such that when data is about a particular street for example, it is given that the concept of the street is given a URL so other people talking about the street can link to it, so that as you end up pulling data from other sources you get more and more, richer and richer data. That is when you start discovering things, when you link the data together. In fact, if you are into data, you probably know that when you join data, that is the only interesting thing to do with data, just looking at it is not interesting. There are Web pages and documents and poems which is nice to look at. You don't have to link between them. It is cool to link between them, but when you link data together, you discover things you never discovered before. You build things you didn't build before. The web data is doubling every ten months at the last count. There is a recent phenomenon, is that standards, there are various standards for putting out linked data, whether it's RDF, informal standards called turtle that a lot of people like. There is huge amounts of that out there. There is a query protocol, called sparkle -- sparql, with a Q-L at the end. There is RDF/A. RDF/A is a relatively recent link data terms standard for putting data inside your Web page so when you have a Web page on a product, a machine can't pull the data about that product. So a man can then compare products across not only your Website but other Websites. If you go to something like Best Buy for example, every product in Best Buy has RDF data. The RDF data is expanding rapidly. It is part of the link data cloud. There is a recent initiative from the search engine companies, Google and Yahoo! called schema.org, where they have said we think it's actually really useful for you to put data about, to annotate your Web page, and they have produced their own suggested things like price and weight and quite complicated things, saying (inaudible) what happens when you put data on there and search engine picked it up, instead of getting a snippet of text from the page, a search engine can give you a little product (inaudible) not just look at all the pages about products but actually, look at the product and compare the different washing machines, so what top spin speed is for example because top spin speed is in their data on the Web page, without search engine trying to understand English on the Web page. That is what is happening through RDF/A. In fact, two formats, both W3C at the same time, which will have to get rationalized, one called microdata, one called RDF/A, very similar. Very exciting. If there is a company, you know, or government near you, and their data isn't on the web, you need to go out and have a little talk to them, because otherwise they will miss the boat. The second question, is there such a thing as good web users, so many human beings are web users now, it's a question, like saying is there an appropriate behavior for human being. That's a proof of behavior. We have to talk quite a long time to find out exactly what is meant by the question. So maybe we should do it off line afterwards. You are cheating if you ask too many questions. >> I'm a tech entrepreneur. I see the Internet as the new (inaudible) this century (inaudible) America. Which (inaudible) Thomas Jefferson. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Country you are saying. I think I'd point out the Internet (inaudible) a lot of people initially, when they first met the Internet, they thought it was, they had the idea of cyberspace as being the new frontier, the new pioneer frontier with no laws. They were wrong, because everybody who is on the Internet is also in a country. Everybody who is doing something on the Internet, so I think it's interesting, one of the things I tried to point out to people, is that if you are doing something fraudulent on the Internet, you are doing something fraudulent so you will go to jail, real jail, in the real world. So Vint, you want to reflect on the... (Pause) For every question you ask, Vint is storing up two or three answers. He is going to come back >> We have a person in the back. >> My name is Shawn, working New York City for profit start-up, using New York City public data mine to wire digital networks on street addresses, and also founding a not-for-profit called General United, trying to mainstream web data and create new protocols. Three parts to comment on. Icelandic modern media initiative for transparency, are you familiar with that? >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Icelandic? >> Icelandic modern media initiative, initiative to create data transparency haven in Iceland, hope to propagate that to other countries. That is part 1. Net neutrality, with things like distributed peer to peer networks, like to ask, social network alternative (inaudible) availability of new generic top level domains, how do those blend in to the Internet. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Each one, conference of its own. Let me pick one. In that general area, one of the themes running through that, one of the things I'm interested in, is robustness of the web. A bunch of us have been worried about this in back rooms for a long time. A lot of other people out there thought that the web was like the rain, Internet was like the air, occasionally stop, break in the rain, but basically rely on it coming again. And then when the Internet was turned off in Egypt, suddenly people realized, wait a moment. They saw what can happen. Everybody read Tim's book, the Master Switch, and people started wondering who is going to send it off. Is it going to be a big company? Is it going to be a big government? But the other question also you have to ask is, are we going to, is it going to be more like the New York power outage? Are we going to build an Internet which hums well but we messed up. We haven't done mathematics about things, propagate, and there is an unseen tipping point around the corner, after that tipping point when a tweet can bring the net down because of the way the auto tweeters have been set up and how the way people fall back on to, the way auto bloggers tweet, blog automatically when tweets go above a certain level. Are we building a stable system? There is corporate or government interference in the places where you can distinguish between them, technically, and there is failure due to, if you like, accidental design flaw. I would really like us to think a lot actually, do stuff and change protocols, to make the web more resilient. I would like it, for example, my favorite idea is that when I click on a link from Website A to Website B, and the browser gets the time-out from Website B, doesn't get a 404, just gets a time-out, there is something wrong with the Internet level, it can't tell anything else, it goes back to Website A. It knows where it came from. It goes back to Website A and says, your link to B, think about it. What is going on here? The responsible Website A will keep a list maybe of things like the check sum of things that it link to, maybe a complete copy to one level down everything it linked to. Maybe it will say I'm a member of the northeast universities or the chemistry university's mutual aid group and B is too. So you can go to any one of us. In fact, you can use hash table to find out who among this group of chemists, chemistry libraries, will have the article, and there should be at least three copies of it, one on each continent. So for example. So building the system so that http starts to morph into a protocol seamlessly, and so that you don't have to install anything special, so that it comes to your web browser so you don't get put in prison for installing anti-government software. You just get the latest at each browser, yeah, I think it's necessary. Also, we have to think about making more responsive for disaster response. New York did a huge amount of data after 9/11. Immediately after 9/11, I saw people who were putting together special systems just to figure out everything they could about New York in three dimensions. So now that stuff exists. If another disaster, something unexpected, say a tornado hits New York, then who will be able to get that? Will it be multiple copies, does everybody know where it is? If the wrong office is completely taken out, how do people bootstrap themselves? There is an interesting comment in the Times article by John Markov interviewing the Egyptian ISP who realized that Egypt was intact, but had been cut off. Ha-Ha, we can use IRC; I always wanted to get back to using IRC. All I have to do is set up an IRC server. I don't have one inside the country. There is one in America. I come install my IRC. So we can bootstrap ourselves out. Robustness is an encouraging thing. (Pause.) >> We are working to humanize the Internet through linguistics and psychology and economics and mathematics as you mentioned. I was wondering if maybe you had any comments or if I could pick your brain on humanizing the Internet and standardizing Internet, the idea of interaction, rather than logical keywording and so on, turning into thoughts and emotions. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Humanity, you mean things like -- >> Treating everything we do as a humanist as interaction. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Including not just the factual content but emotional channel as well, that sort of thing? >> Right, yeah. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: That is very interesting. >> Not just (inaudible) but businesses and entities and events. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: I don't know a lot about what you are doing, but it sounds that you've got your company mentioned in the Q and A, and so certainly, there is a -- sorry, I'm teasing -- certainly, people tweeted were surprised about the fact that W3C has standards for emoticons, but a lot of people figure if you standardize, if you can take, look at the emotional, standard emotions you come with, we seem to have them in common with people, all nationalities, they are not language things, we also have them in common with docs. So they seem to be (inaudible) while ago in the evolution before we developed complex language. Disclaimer, I'm not an expert, all these things are very interesting. So for example, understanding how people react emotionally and being able to pick out of their tweeting the emotional pieces and being able to track that back is interesting. I think actually I'm also interested in neural science which is going on to understand how people behave and tend to react rapidly, and sometimes against their better judgment rapidly. Fascinating results I heard recently, that you can put something in a fMRI and you can see a racist response triggered within a short number of milliseconds, and in a nonracist you see an overwhelming suppressing results from a much more higher level part of the brain. In the racist that isn't there. People who couldn't imagine a (inaudible) never lived or worked with anybody (inaudible) the understanding, how people operate in that area, need guidance to build systems, where for example, a time-out before you can respond at video game speed to somebody coming around the corner intellectually or physically, in a virtual world, that we actually, can we build systems which allow us, the thinking part, allow nonracist bit to click in. I'm disconnected to a very large area which I'd like you all to get involved in, areas building systems, collaborative systems on the net which allow us to do our democracy, our science, figure out what to believe, build meritocracies, to supplement and maybe later even improve on the current systems we have, like peer review and review of experiments to figure out science, current systems we have for democracy. Maybe we have got the system, fairly old system developed when people ran around on horses, so how we elect people to run the country, now we have systems, even breaks down country borders, how can we build, imagine a different topology of a democracy. It's great to see different Websites experimenting with different forms of democracy. Maybe one of them will find nice systems which are pro human and allow to preserve a lot of respect and allow us to come to conclusions without all the nastiness which we otherwise tend to be, try to find that. >> DAVID SOLOMONOFF: We are running a minute or two behind now. I'd like to take one more question. I have one from John McFee here which goes back a little ways to other things we were discussing. How much does the rise of unrestricted managed services, quote-unquote, in the mobile arena flatten the open Internet; is the distinction clear in the public mind? >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: I think, I defined what I mean by net neutrality, by Internet, if you have connected with a speed and you have connected with speed, we can talk to each other no matter what application at a given speed, with given quality of service. Managed services, there are all kind of things where, which fall between completely proprietary system, where like cable TV where you have a wire and it gives you just TV, and the Internet which has been tweaked a little bit so that in fact your TV from particular places has been optimized. And in fact, good network management involves doing lots of complicated things. So I think Vint may address this also. I think it's really important for the ISP community to be able to figure out how to distribute the funding between each other in the fair fashion so that all the funding which is set at the edge, appropriate amounts of it are given to guests to the ISPs which is a really difficult problem solver anyway. But the constraint, so managed services, actually, the idea that if you give me an Internet which is particularly tuned for getting video from a particular supplier is, will be a fantastic deal, because it allows you to invest much more and it allow me to get it cheaper and stuff, I think it's a dangerous argument, and I think whenever you say, people say basically, whenever you see large companies say unless we screw the consumer we won't be able to put in the investment, that this really needs to be able to get Internet to every last person on the planet. That, I think, is not a, is a not an argument I would listen to for a moment. At the end of the day, when it comes to making the net neutral it may be you can imagine a nonneutral net which would be cheaper, well, in fact, if you give complete control of your life to a company, they will probably actually not charge you for it at all but give it to you in a box. So yeah, we will end up paying for the right to be able to connect to anybody. But the neutral Internet is worth paying for. And the whole idea that no, we can't do it, for reasonable price, is unreasonable, when the prices are falling so much. When as fiber goes in, as technology gets more efficient, prices have fallen. Do people think they won't fall anymore? That would be kind of odd to imagine we have this onrush of technology over since the steam age and it's now going to stop? So I think that if, when you are doing that balance between what is reasonable managed service and what is open Internet, I say that you should always err on the side of making sure that the net is neutral, because it's more than just trying to balance economics, it's fundamental, it is a fundamental need of Democratic society and Democratic world. >> DAVID SOLOMONOFF: Let's thank Tim. (Applause.)