JUNE 14, 2011 INET NEW YORK ****** 13:30 Panel: People Power >> SALLY SHIPMAN WENTWORTH: Thanks, Vint. If everyone can stay seated, we will bring our next panel up and continue the discussion that Vince kindly teed up for us. >> I'd like to introduce the moderator, Stefanie Mehta, who oversees technology international in Washington, coverage for Fortune and also sets the overall editorial direction for the magazine, and serves as co-chair on two of the Fortune live events, brainstorm tech and the most powerful women's summit. >> STEPHANIE MEHTA: Thank you very much. Can everybody hear okay? Terrific. We have to make up a little bit of time this afternoon. We are going to jump right into it. As was noted in the previous session, it has been an extraordinary few months for empowered users of technology. The Arab Spring and the actions in Egypt in particular have demonstrated the power of social networking as a tool for political and social change. This weekend the New York Times reported the U.S. state department and defense department have been working together to develop the Internet in a suitcase, a mesh network that enables users in countries where there has been a failure of the telecommunications networks to do an end run essentially. And there are all kinds of exciting things happening in the world of the Internet and technology when it comes to user empowerment. On the other hand, the day after the report on the Internet in a suitcase came out of the New York Times, the same newspaper reported on their front page that the FBI is laying guidelines to expand the agents' use of the ability to search databases and use technology for surveillance. And we are watching investors reward technology companies, amass large number of subscribers in part because those subscribers turn over incredible amounts of data that can be mined and monetized. It is indeed an extraordinary time and the future is only going to get more interesting. We are here today to discuss the role the users will play in shaping the Internet and Internet policy. But obviously the platform is so much bigger. Empowered technology users can bring down governments, and depending on your perspective, help enrich or impoverish would-be technology entrepreneurs. To help us understand the roles the users are, can and will play in shaping the Internet, we have an esteemed group of panelists. You have their bios in front of you: Eben Moglen, Professor at Columbia University, Director- Counsel and Chairman at Software Freedom Law Center; David Gross, a former ambassador and partner at Wiley Rein and one of the foremost experts in telecommunications policy worldwide; Gigi Sohn is president and cofounder of Public Knowledge, which promotes Democratic principles and cultural values around openness, access and ability to create and compete. Finally, Brad Burnham is a partner at Union Square Ventures here in New York, former AT&T executive who helped create that company's capital arm and serves on the boards of companies like Tumbler and (indecipherable.) Finally, we have all of you. This is after all a panel about empowered users, and so we intend to empower you and bring you into the conversation early. So please have your questions and thoughts percolating early in the conversation. And please feel free to raise your hand if you wish to weigh in. I'm going to start with you, Eben. People used the terms user and consumer somewhat interchangeably in our dialogue. You took a little issue with that. What is the difference in your mind between a user and a consumer? And the question is, how can users best use their power in 2011? >> EBEN MOGLEN: People we are calling users built the net. They are not something unnecessary to it, and they are not the end point in it. Vint and I and everybody else who wrote code and created communities are users, and we built the net. The net we built had the properties Vint said he wanted in the net in the future, security, openness, transparency. We are now in the process of watching four kinds of forces trying to take the net away from us: Governments, which as Vint says are afraid of the reframing power of the dialogue democratically undertaken; content owners as they call themselves who believe their bits are sacred, and who believe that the entire engineering of the net should be reshaped at any moment in order to protect the sacredness of their bits against the two things that networks are for, one, copying bits, and two, sharing bits; the data miners, who have a business model for industry in the 21st century which is to figure out what you want before you know yourself and sell you to an advertiser quickly; and the network operators, whose job it is to break our networks, and sell us the repairs. Those four forces put together are building a net which lacks anonymity, transparency, security and the other things that Vint says he wants, and the reason is, they don't work for us. They work for themselves. The important point about users is, we use the net to do what we want, and the net which is being technically redesigned beneath us, the one we made, we made http, we made Pearl, we made python, we made Linux, we made the stuff the net is made of. Don't be fooled into thinking somebody else made it and provided it to you. We made it. The net we made is being distorted, power is being taken away from the edge, and concentrated in the center. The net Vint was talking about has nodes which are peers. The very idea that there is such a thing as a servant and a client or a master and a slave or a consumer and a provider is a cultural imposition on the technology of the net. What users are going to do next is they are going to take power back to the edge. In the same way that they have in media, in the same way that they have in software, we are going to do it with the net itself, by eliminating the idea that there are servers and there are clients and that there are customers and then there are providers. This is a 21st century server, as powerful as the server that sits on a rack or under a desk or on it, using about a 10th as much power and providing all of the communications facilities that you would expect the service providing computer on the net to have, as well as a couple of radios for making mesh. Never mind the suitcase. You know the state department; they pack heavy. (Chuckles). Our net is going to be made of small cheap devices which are going to contain free software whose purpose is to serve privacy, to serve transparency, to serve anonymity to us. Vint is correct about what we want. He is correct about what we need. He and we are the people who know how to make it. We are going to have free telephony, that is, safe telephony, secure telephony, accessible telephony, inexpensive telephony, and network operators are going to have a little trouble. We are going to have anonymous publication and sharing, and content owners are not going to have sacred bits. We are going to slow down governments that hurt people, that tear out their fingernails, that destroy them. We are going to make it difficult to data mine people because we are going to restore the anonymity which is the absolute fundamental requirement of decent human life. The project I'm working on at the moment is called freedom box. It's not this. This is capitalism. It takes care of itself. It is just free software. It's just an SD card load to take things like this and make them serve you instead of someone else. We are going to carpet bomb the net with freedom. It's going to work. We are going to get what we want. The people who don't want us to get what we want can stuff it. Thank you very much. (Applause.) >> STEPHANIE MEHTA: Gigi, you were nodding during Eben's comments, but you represent all consumers. You don't represent just users, just people who built the net. There are every-day people out there who are benefiting from the work that Eben and his peers have done, but at the same time, are not active participants in their Internet use. How do consumers empower themselves? >> GIGI SOHN: We not only deal with folks who follow Eben, and Eben is a visionary of course, but we also deal with the ordinary consumer who wouldn't know that from a magic jack. So and I have to deal with the day- to-day doings of Washington, and the power of the network operators, and the power of the copyright holders, who are taking the Internet we know today, and closing it off. I love what Eben had to say. I don't know when that time is going to happen where we just carpet bomb them and have a whole new Internet that is open, universally accessible and transparent, and all the wonderful values that Vint and Eben just talked about. But I'm doing a lot with the here and now. And in the here and now, we are talking about a colossal merger of first and fourth largest wireless providers, which is going to end up raising the price for wireless Internet access, which is what most lower income folks rely upon. I'm dealing with a bill called the Protect IP Act, which would allow the Attorney General to force Internet service providers, search engines, domain name registers, to block domain names. Talk about fragmenting the Internet. It would hurt the (inaudible) which Vint talked about. You may have heard the Department of Homeland Security which has so much experience with copyright and the Internet is already taking down domain names, blocking domain names, some which are legal in the countries in which they exist. I'm talking about Oha direct. So I love Eben's vision but we are far away from that right now. Right now I have to deal with the fact that the Internet is nowhere near universally accessible and certainly nowhere near universally affordable. We have significant swaths of the population who cannot get on the Internet because they live in rural areas or underserved urban areas, too expensive for them. Got to deal with increasingly consolidating markets. Essentially most people have a choice of two land lines, Internet providers, cable operator and telephone company in most communities. We have a shrinking wireless market. Of course, we have Hollywood, which is unbelievably technical, and the government, there is where I align with the network operators actually, and are essentially trying to break the Internet to protect their copyright, while the money keeps pouring in from international and national ticket sales and also from on-line streaming. Meanwhile, they won't even -- I don't want to make a speech, but I'll say one more thing. Meanwhile they won't even try, they are barely trying to get their content out on-line when people want it at a fair price. That is the here and now. The geeks may use those systems, but to the extent that I'm concerned about the broader, I don't think everybody is a consumer anymore because everybody uses the Internet to create. Nobody sits back and consumes like watching television. But to the extent I'm representing more ordinary folks, right now they are getting royally screwed in Washington and we have less concern. >> STEPHANIE MEHTA: How do we empower the masses? How do we get people who are affected by consolidation, by government policy, to be more proactive and to take a greater role in supporting what you are doing, Gigi? >> GIGI SOHN: It's really difficult, because at a certain level, people understand the kind of work my organization does. They understand that in order to have a Democratic society where everybody can speak and be heard, you have to have decentralized, open, universally accessible communications systems. Everybody understands that. Right? It's not that hard. But when you tell them what you have to do to get there, do this filing at the SBC, we have to lobby congress, we have people, eyes start to glaze over. I will admit, though I've been doing this work for 20 years, I haven't found the message that quite hits yet. I'll take any advice anybody has, any advice from the audience on what the magic bullet would be to get people to understand how critical an open and Democratic communication system is to their every-day lives, to getting jobs, to being able to create, to being able to stay in touch with friends and family. I don't think people necessarily understand the connection of technology and politics. >> STEPHANIE MEHTA: Brad, you had something to adds. >> BRAD BURNHAM: I was going to say that I think the root problem here is that the harm of an open Internet is concentrated. It's concentrated with copyright holders, concentrated with network operators, because they lose control over their cost structures, and they watch their cost structures collapsing as this network takes out their intermediary position. It's concentrated. Turns out those people for whom the harm is concentrated are influential, because they have spent years building relationships, in order to influence policy to protect their interests. The benefits of an open Internet are diffuse. They accrue to start-ups, companies that for the first time ever can get directly to a consumer without asking permission, and they accrue to consumers who get the benefit of all this innovation. Start-ups and consumers are not nearly as well organized in Washington as the incumbents are on both the intellectual property side and network side. In trying to answer the question of what could one do, one could ideally figure out a way of using the Internet to organize these diffuse interests into a more concentrated interest to represent a counterweight in Washington. I'm not sure how to do it. I think ultimately, you grapple with the problem, that I think it was Oscar Wilde who said the problem with being a socialist is you have to go to lots of meetings. I'm not sure that consumers yet understand how important it is to go to those meetings. >> I think it was June who asked the question about the fifth estate, and other countries being very aware of it, but not so much in the United States. And David, I guess implicit in the question is, we are apathetic in the United States or we don't realize the power of the tools and technologies and freedoms to report it. Can you respond and speak to that a little? >> DAVID GROSS: That may be, but listening to this conversation you might think we are on the precipice of a disaster. Maybe it's my age. But I grew up before the Internet. The changes that have occurred, the empowerment of individuals, the economic progress, the political change, the freedoms that have occurred in the United States and particularly around the world, which is where I focus most of my attention, are nothing short of historic and miraculous. I'm not taking issue with any of the comments because these are discussions, debates that are critical to continue to ensure we make progress. I'm not here to say all is well and we should stop where we are. Quite the opposite. But from my perspective as someone who is involved in policy-making and industry and government service for a good number of years, is that what has driven this progress has been technology. It has not been policymakers. Sometimes they get in the way. Sometimes they promote. You can have a serious discourse by reasonable and serious people about what that, those parameters should look like. But don't mistake the fact that there is a debate and a serious debate and serious issues for a lack of progress that, if anything, has continued to accelerate, not decelerate. That is true in the United States. As I look at the world that my 26-year- old son lives in, as compared to when I was 26, his opportunities, his ability to communicate, his ability to connect, his ability to continue to have what I think is an extraordinarily bright future because of the technological changes that have occurred, and that pales, pales in comparison to the opportunities that are true globally. And the changes we have seen, obviously the Arab Spring is one manifestation of that, but even that manifestation, as dramatic and important as it is, and has been, pales in comparison to the change that have happened globally over the last decade or so. The changes that people have been able to, brought out of dire poverty, the ability of people to have access to information, the ability of people to no longer be captured by their history, but to be connected to the rest of the world, is nothing short of revolutionary and historic. (Applause.) >> We are really proud of the net we build, and I don't want to (inaudible) wonderful things you say it is doing. On the other hand, we now have a single centralized database with 600 million people or so in it with their entire lives being documented and informed on by their friends. That system now incorporates facial recognition which is busily being trained by all those 600 million people to improve its ability to identify a human being in a single web cam shot from any direction any time in any lighting. That means that any government with the power of subpoena or coercion or bribery or purchase can now acquire starting with a photograph of the human being everything about that person's social life, affiliates, associates, habits, mechanisms, locales, modus operandi within seconds, all of which results not from the positive power of social networking but from the danger of privacy invading technology implementing important features in a suboptimal way. We now have to find a way to move those 600 million people safely and easily out of the animated spying system within which they are living their entire social lives, without disrupting their circles of friends or without causing them any feature loss. That is a serious technical problem. It is not going to be dealt with by legislation, not going to be dealt with by government. Governments need Facebook now because no national security system wants to be without Facebook now. So we have to fix the problem. What David has said is correct. We have changed the future of the human race with our technology in 20 years. Now we have to change it again. >> Eben, I wonder if you have a view on the degree to which a lot of the value that those 600 prisoners inside of Facebook -- >> 600 million. >> 600 million, excuse me, 600 million prisoners get out of that experience comes from the fact that they are willingly sharing that data, and others become aware of their interests and are allowed, are able to interact. >> EBEN MOGLEN: Almost all the value comes that way, but none of that value requires a central database that somebody else can go behind. We are going to replace centralized social networking with federated social networking which is going to give everybody an opportunity to do everything they now do except to contribute to Mark's great big database. We are going to do everything we were doing before, we are just not going to have the KGB watching. That's all. >> What is the role of, as the capitalist on the table -- (chuckles). >> I'm a capitalist! >> As the financier on the table, what is the role of the corporation? I hear what Eben is talking about and I hear the word federated, and I feel like it's almost, it lacks the panache and sophistication that marketing brings to the table. Is there a value corporations bring by trying to market this stuff and make us want to buy it before we know we want to buy it? >> Yes, I think there is a value. I find myself in a position as venture capitalist, different from a capitalist, because I back small start-up companies that are almost always the attackers, not defenders. Right now we have companies who are threatened by the scale of Google and Facebook. So we would love to see an environment in which new ideas can compete effectively with established companies, even recently established companies like Google and Facebook. So I love the image of a flatter, decentralized organic emergent innovation that isn't controlled by a single entity. We should all aspire to that. That is good for capitalism because it's more resilient and innovative. There are examples of situations where there is a trade-off between user experience and openness. I think Apple is one example of that, where Apple decided they want to have a great deal of control over user experience, and they have limited the degree to which people can innovate on top of their tools and their platform. I think they have demonstrated that, you can look around the room, you see Macs on tables, they have demonstrated there is a value in that. The question is, at what point does that value become a liability? I think that historically it has been true that openness prompts integration during periods of rapid technical change and during periods when that change is slowing, then the reverse happens. Integration trumps openness. I think that is a natural rhythm that will keep going. But there is a role for both. I'd like to think that the role is ideally architected such that companies are, not allowed, companies are enabled by the underlying market architecture to scale quickly and rapidly and bring new things to market quickly and rapidly, but there is a natural fervor there or ferment there as new companies arise. >> I want to add, to me (inaudible) Internet are not created equal. I'm interested in the bottleneck (inaudible) Facebook lost 6 million users in one month. I think we forget how young Google is, how young Facebook is. I think things are cyclical. Does anybody remember Netscape anymore? Alta Vista? 15 years ago they were the next big applications that were going to eat everybody up over the Internet. I am concerned about the growing power of Facebook and Google. I do wonder why you have one very dominant search engine, one dominant social network, one dominant on-line retailer, Amazon. I think antitrust officials are looking at that. I'm not sure what the policy answer is to that. But we have to keep in mind history. AT&T has been around for 100 years. They got broken up. They are getting put back together again. That is not as true with the applications layer. You see dominant applications come and go. I'm willing to give Facebook and Google a little more time before we engage in heavy-handed regulation. I'm not saying that I'm completely and totally opposed to some consumer protection, fraud or transparency regulation, allowing people to control their own privacy anonymity experience on line. But I worry less about that than I do about the infrastructure. >> I want to open it up to questions in a moment, and start getting your perspective and feedback. But David, coming back to the issue of the Internet as a global entity, our conversations have largely focused on U.S. policy. Tell us about what you are seeing around the world, and how we make sure that globally the Internet continues to function and is open and has full access and gets distributed to as many users as possible. >> DAVID GROSS: I guess in a nutshell it's the usual good news and there is bad news on these things, or troubling news perhaps. Good news is that people want more of it. Whether they are consumers or users, people are involved and the explosive growth that Vint talked about, it's quite extraordinary. 2 billion users today, around the world, and growing rapidly. Just extraordinary numbers. Those that Vint pointed out are being connected through wireless is where the engine of growth for Internet access is globally is at. What you see going on from a policy making perspective is very positive, generally speaking. But obviously there are a lot of issues, a lot of warning signs out there, lot of governments are not happy about this. Those governments are not located just in a couple of regions. They are still quite global. The policy issues that they would like to see, that could have an adverse impact on the sorts of issues you have been talking about today, take many forms. For example, there are some governments obviously who are extraordinarily repressive and want to keep the people from having access to the Internet itself. Cuba comes to mind for example. There are people in jail today because of trying to bring Internet access to people of Cuba. There are others who have embraced the Internet in certain ways, like China, which has the largest on-line population, but control access in many political and other economic ways, quite substantially. You have other conversations in places like Europe, which on the one hand want to see more Internet access, more high-speed broadband access and so forth, have policies designed to try to promote this. But they are very concerned over what they consider the over the top side which is the application side, which they view as primarily American, and where the value seems to be going. Their view is, what is wrong with the, why are American companies getting the value of the Internet and not as much the Europeans? They are looking at policies that create issues there. If you dig down, there are lots of things to be concerned about. Nevertheless, we are in an extraordinarily good time generally. You compare where we are today, during the even five, six, eight years ago, when there was a lot of concern about governments trying to take control of things like I 10 and others, there is still some of that rumbling going on, but it is substantially less now than it was before. >> STEPHANIE MEHTA: Do we have any comments or questions from the audience? Is there a mic runner? Gentleman right up here in the Honolulu T-shirt. >> My name is Eric. The question focuses mainly to Mr. Moglen. If we are going to try to come out with a new topology for distribution of content to be more peer-to-peer based where we don't have to go through corporate entity, do you see the main challenges are not on the software but more on the physics that are involved with regards to actual distance that exists, and even if someone comes up with a solution to that, more powerful transmitter, the FCC gets involved? >> EBEN MOGLEN: Vint is right. The point about the network we built is that it doesn't care how you carry things. 9/10ths of the time we don't care about which of the people are moving our packets and the 1/10 of the time when we care, we can encrypt it, tunnel it or otherwise do something about it that makes it harder to steal or observe or interfere with. The future of mesh networking, and future of wi-fi and future of the other forms of self-assembled wireless net is very bright. The network operators spent ten years scaring you out of running an open wireless router in your house. If everybody had been running open wireless routers in the house, VOIP would be giving free phone calls everywhere, they would be getting a tax cut of the roughly 100 bucks a month they are currently paying to have a crappy version that works poorly. We got scared into not self-assembling a better net than we are presently provided by the people whose job it is to break it and making us pay to fix it. Wireless routers are going to break around the world, and they are going to be replaced by things which are more powerful and don't cost any more. Slowly, a better net is going to self-assemble around people, what you might want to call the cloud, a lot of servers running a lot of software that do a lot of stuff for human beings. And because the hardware is cheap and software is free, the profit mode of the providers doesn't force the net to work the way you don't want it to work. Brad is correct. What we need now is user experience that makes it fun and easy, to have a network that provides personal privacy to you. That is what the freedom project is for. Take all the functional software, Torr and TPG and Tink and open GPN and other wonderful stuff we have done in the last 20 years, and put it together in a package which gives ordinary human beings a thing cheap to buy and very easy to run is that gives them functional privacy and allows them to communicate anonymously and freely. How long is it going to take? Two years. (Inaudible) ubiquitous in five, we are going to be ahead of it. Set top boxes are already being made in China and Viet Nam for sale in their own home markets. Get used to it, kids. The freedom machines are coming. All we need to do is to provide the software. We make software. We made the software that makes the net. We know how. We are going to do it. It is going to happen. Public policy will be largely irrelevant. Times when rapid change makes public policy irrelevant are times which are called revolutions. There is one going on. It is going to destroy copyright laws this generation. It is going to make it possible for every brain on earth to learn this generation. I said 15 years ago that if the thing we were calling the information super highway had been called the universal education system, we would have different policy around it. I was right. It's the universal education system. Not for you and me, but for the kids in the street in Bangalore I work with. They know perfectly well that the Internet is the universal education system. They know that it would change their lives if they could learn anything they want. I work with a set of kids in a free software computing center in a slum in Bangalore where 2200 people live with one toilet. 2200 people, 1478 children, one toilet. 842 mobile phones, because mobile phones are available to the poorest of the poor. We can put every book ever written, every painting, every piece of music, scientific experiment, every map, every piece of knowledge which helps a human being become himself or herself in the biggest way, we can put those on every one of those phones, but for the rules against sharing. How many of Einsteins who ever lived were allowed to learn physics? How many of the Shakespeares who ever lived, lived and died without learning to read and write? Pretty much all of them. We have always thrown away almost all the brains. In this generation, for the first time in the history of human beings, we don't have to. There are six billion people on earth, 3 billion of them under 25. How many Einsteins do you want to throw away today? So we are going to change the way the net works because we are going to educate every brain on earth. Do you think there is concentrated power that doesn't like free network? Think about the impacted concentrated power that loves ignorance. Think of how ignorance has always been good for concentrated power throughout the history of the human race. Now imagine us fixing it. That is where we are going. The rest of the stuff is small deal. (Applause.) >> Gentleman with the glasses, right there. >> Dennis from the United Nations. I think it's the fourth estate, as a journalist covering this from the early '80s, you have to understand, public policy is not going to go away, sir. What we are looking at though is a total radical rethink of the system across the board. The FCC approach trying to push demand stimulus rather than supply stimulus was the first step. But there are certain things which we are going to have to do in terms of opening up military spectrum, where most countries (inaudible) provided by military or government itself. There has to be a radical rethink which through the broadband commission last year, rethink was a (inaudible) major member, one of the sub authors, but this does come back to public policy. In the countries in terms of stimulating health and education and opening up the networks and public services. Thank you. >> I was afraid I was going to have to shut down public knowledge in two years. But do you know that there are laws being passed as we speak today that make using an open wi-fi router illegal? If you don't think that the incumbents are going to try to go into the states to the FCC, to the congress, to try to make a freedom box illegal, you are smoking crack. Okay? For that reason alone, public policy is not going to be irrelevant. Because there is going to be, there are companies, multi billion dollar, multinational companies, and for every workaround, they are going to try to get a law passed that makes that workaround illegal. It is never going to go away. It may be, we may be playing more of a defensive game, ala what we are doing in copyright now, saying don't overregulate, as opposed to what we could do with net neutrality and say (inaudible) competitive regulation to tamp down the power of the incumbent, maybe it's more of a defensive game. But as long as governments, unless you are also purporting to carpet bomb all governments, public policy and all lobbyists, I'm not a lobbyist, public policy is always going to have a role. Spectrum is very important obviously. There always will be a role for pro competitive policies that promote innovation and openness. >> Over here in the painter's cap, red shirt. >> I have a couple questions. My name is Edward Hall. I started a company here in New York City, open source company, not necessarily apply to technology but to approaches along the same lines what the gentleman was talking about. I have a question about decentralized currency as well as the idea of people self-electing themselves to be public servants on the web. So there's, I feel that these are two very important powerhouses that we have, I guess as every day people, beyond the advent of technology, but actually having, there is a good actual example of this called Bitcoin, that is a completely decentralized anonymous currency that is actually contentious because it's being used in all kinds of underground markets. I'm interested in your thoughts on the new advent of completely decentralized coinage, as well as people who are developing these technologies, as public servants, and the idea of that as being a public servant to this web, this whole world web. >> I'd argue that the people who are creating Bitcoin do think of themselves as creating a service to the public, and creating a new kind of economy that may not be subject to all of the same constraints that a regulated economy is. I think if I hear the conversation on the panel here, it's between Eben who is convinced that we don't have to worry about what public policy is, because we have a combination of technology and currencies and everything else that allow us to operate outside of that policy, and then Gigi who is grappling with the way policy is constructed today. I think the reality is that there probably isn't a perfect world. I remember I used to be, I grew up as a rabid libertarian. I remember in college having long debates late at night about why we need government at all. And my roommate would always point out Beirut. And at the time it was a shambles. And there is a framework that can be created around monetary policy and may be an exchange rate between Bitcoins and other currencies might have to have some kind of management in it. I don't know. I don't know what it would be. But it's, the thing we are not discussing here, and in fact we have actually dodged it all the way through the afternoon here, Vint was talking about the Internet that he wants to see. He describes a set of things that are inherently contradictory. He wants privacy and yet he wants safety. We are going to have to figure out a way to bring those two together. Even if Eben is right, and in some ways I hope he is, because it's a wonderful wild west free market that he is describing, that will create lots of innovation and opportunity. There is a transition period, there is an exist, there is a framework within which we all exist, and unfortunately there are still people out there with guns who can enforce laws. We are going to have to figure out how these two worlds fit together. I would like to see us try and grapple with these hard questions, and just instead of saying we need a balance between safety and anonymity, let's talk about what the principles we need to define where that balance should be, and who should administer that balance, and what the role between the, the relationship between the network and the host governments of that network should be. >> I think that's right. I don't think there is actually a disagreement. I think there is difference of time scales. Gigi emphasized from the beginning that the point of view of a person working on the ground as a public policy lawyer is now. She is right. Now you have to worry about now. In the world we live in now, you are always fighting the corruption of the other side. The FCC's real purpose is get jobs for its former commissioners, highly paid lobbyists. All other activity is ancillary to the real purpose. >> I love Eben. He makes me sound so moderate. >> EBEN MOGLEN: That is what (inaudible) I wait for the book with a good deal of expectation. This fall we will see what he means to say about political corruption in that regard. I think it's important. We are constantly as Gigi says enforcing an attempt to defend what we think our values are against concentrated people with too much money and too little public respect. Okay, fine. Now, I say over the long scale it's not about one guy fighting the good fight in Washington and another fighting a good fight in Brussels, another one in Moscow, each of them trying to push uphill the immense torrent of money that wants to get married to power. Instead we have to scale down and go low, do what we have done before, to fight impacted power. You remember when Microsoft was the richest and most invulnerable country in the world, and I was running the ragtag army of people who were going to one day be able to compete with it? You remember what I'm talking about is not a vision. Don't buy that. I'm talking about what we have already done and what we are going to do next. I'm announcing to you what the program is. I will be wrong if you decide not to make it happen. But it is eminently possible and it is surely going to occur if you want it. Vint started in the right place. What do you want? >> Can I throw out a question? Is there any, any role at all in the vision that you are describing for some kind of collective governance and some kind of platform, and let's just take the safety issue, for some way of assuring, or the Internet fire department issue, is there some way that you can imagine that happening? >> EBEN MOGLEN: Sure. You don't notice any self-government in the wikipedia or Linux? You don't notice us worrying about safety and flexibility and accessibilities? Apache Software Foundation doesn't care about security, safety, accessibility? We do self-government all the time, every day. We do it the hard way. We are socialists and we do go places in the evening. Right? That's not the problem. It's not that we can't have government. It's that we don't want corrupt government. It's that we don't want government that word ships the profit motive above technological elegance or human usability. It's that we now have to engage in an ecological activity of getting back from run aways the stuff they are making out of what we made. You point to all those Apple laptops in the room without saying they are made on our base. We made that stuff too. Steve comes along and puts razzle-dazzle, shizzle on the state, offers total contempt for the customers, and they pay too much to buy it, but the stuff in there is our stuff. We gave it to him. We said, here. This is a kernel. This is an operating system; you might like it. Want to use it? It's free. He said yes. I'm not surprised. Lots of people say yes to us because we are doing noncorrupt governments. We are making stuff happen. You think wikipedia is not an example of democracy? The problem is one percent of the population owns 40 percent of the wealth in the United States. That produces concentrated power that wants its own lunch protected. We work for people. The network works for people. We don't want the lunch eaters to get it. Is there a room for Democratic self-government in the net? You bet. Is that international? Yes. I have clients in every corner of the world. Do they govern their projects? Yes. Do they do so consultatively? By sophisticated conversation and taking votes and doing what needs done? By ruling by consensus? We are not backward politically. I'm not talking about some nonsense that we saw once in a Utopian documentary about something we could do some day. I'm talking about where $100 billion worth of capital equipment came from that changed human civilization. We did it. Now we are going to do more. If you want it to support freedom, it will. If you get lazy, and want it to support profit, it will do that too. In the process, it will extirpate a lot of what they think makes human life worth living. >> David, you wanted to respond? >> Another question. I'm having fun here. There is, let's talk about profit for a second. Is there any situation that you can imagine in which a market exists where players within that market are motivated by trying to serve consumers as well as they can, in order to make money? >> EBEN MOGLEN: Absolutely. Every day all day long, my clients work everywhere. IBM supports what I do. Hewlett-Packard supports what I do. Oracle supports what I do. We are not talking about a situation which requires us not to be in favor of capitalism. We are talking about a situation which requires us to understand that there are two pillars of the 21st century economy, one is owning, the other is sharing. The sharing economy is currently driving most of the social development on earth. That is just a fact. That's okay. Capitalism is good at doing what it does, which is to come along and market it and get it in every hand and make it accessible to everybody who can't afford to pay, which is a tiny fraction of the people on the earth. It has real purposes. I'm not down on IBM's role in this free software revolution. IBM's role was crucial, is crucial, will be crucial. People who want to make money do lots of good things. But at the end of the day, they shouldn't define what kind of Internet you want. That's all. >> STEPHANIE MEHTA: We only have a few more minutes. I'm going to let David Gross take us out on an upbeat note. Brad is a financier. Eben is the socialist. You are the optimist. >> DAVID GROSS: Always a good place to be. Before I do that, I think one of the things Eben talked about is important, or a lot of what he talked about is important, but the piece to put it all together is there is clearly an important role for government. Government at its best is a reflection of what people's wills are. Obviously there is often a great shortfall in many governments. But we have, and I think he will be speaking soon, Larry Strickling, who has been doing an extraordinarily good job on behalf of all of us, trying to make sure it's effective, issue of Internet governance, the role and relationship between governments, individuals, technology and the like. It's extraordinarily important that one of the things that comes out of this discussion is not the fact that government is corrupt, but the opposite. We are fortunate in the United States. We have an extraordinary number of very good public servants who do it not for the money, but rather because they have a strong interest in making sure that we all have the opportunities that all of us I think are trying to ensure, that is that technology leads, people are benefited and that our children have the better day not only in the United States, but globally. That comes from this extraordinary evolution that Eben talked about through a variety of ways, no one size fits all, but rather that we continue to struggle with these issues, struggle with the public policy issues, so that in fact, as technology changes, as the world changes, as we change, that in fact we get to where we want to go, which is, a better, more prosperous, more intelligent, more educated future, for everyone. >> STEPHANIE MEHTA: On that note I'd like to thank Internet Society for having us and our panelists, Eben Moglen, David Gross, Gigi Sohn, and Brad Burnham. A round of applause. (Applause.) >> Hello. I'd like to thank Stefanie for a great panel. And very quickly, if people could hold on for one second, I have a quick comment or two. We want coffee in the foyer. And Eben originally announced his freedom box project at an Internet Society of New York meeting, after I had asked him to come and talk about the privacy and security implications of cloud computing and social networking. I think that is a great accomplishment, and I'm hoping that the Internet Society of New York and of course the global Internet Society can have that kind of, provide that type of inspiration to new innovation in the future. (Break.)