Ellery Roberts Biddle [mid-sentence]: ...Our weekly video hangout series!
I think - let's see, we started a little bit off time
so I'll say it again:
Ellery: Welcome to GV Face, our weekly video hangout series!
Today, we are celebrating the 25th birthday of the world wide web.
Pretty exciting. That was on Wednesday.
Um, we've got a really all-star lineup of guests
on today's program.
Um, moving from left to right, we have:
Alan Emtage, a very special guest who is
gonna talk to us about his very special creation
of, uh, the first web browser...
Um! We have Jeremy Clark, in Montreal -
Jeremy is a technical director at Global Voices.
Josh Levy, from Free Press,
in Massachusetts, in the U.S.
and Renata Avila, campaign manager for the Web We Want
Creative Commons extraordinaire, and
GV star, who is joining us from Berlin!
Welcome, everybody!
Um. So we wanted to start today's show
by talking a little bit about the world wide web
and the internet.
'Cuz a lot of people think that they're the same thing
when actually, that's not quite true.
I want to first turn to Jeremy
and just ask, Jer, could you
break it down for us, like,
I thought that the internet was invented in the 70's
but, if it's the 25th birthday of the web,
what does that mean?
Jeremy Clark: Okay, well, the
best place to start, I think, is
the internet - it has existed in various formats
since the 1970's, as you said,
but it was the web that really made it
enter our homes.
and, so, understanding the relationship is important.
So, the internet was invented by
the U.S. Government in a lot of senses...
...a mix of military and science funding
that developed the network of actual computers
that can communicate with each other over
wires.
Now, another related technology that is also compri--
[amends] uh, built in to the web
is called hypertext. And that is the notion
of documents that can link between each other
immediately, without having to go and fetch
a separate document. Um.
So there were lots of systems since the 1960s
that were trying to implement hypertext, like,
Xanadu is an example,
uh, but all of them were commercial, expensive, closed,
and none of them were very popular.
So, Tim Berners-Lee, who is the "inventor of the internet,"
[corrects himself] of the web, obviously, the World Wide Web -
Um. [Tim Berners-Lee] put those two things together
by building a service that runs
on top of the internet, and he
called it the World Wide Web.
So what the World Wide Web is, is the
decentralized hypertext engine
that we use to communicate between
computers' web pages.
So what makes up WEB is three things:
URLs (or URIs) - Universal Resource Locator
which are the addresses we use to find things on the web,
[#2] HTML, which is the
HyperText Markup Lanuage
which is the way that the information
is stored and sent
so that we can then use browsers
to view HTML, and then
all the documents can be understood
and then also they display the links
so that the hypertext part of it works
and we can jump around from page to page.
Um, the final part is HTTP, which is
the HyperText Transfer Protocol
which is the communication method
by which the different computers can
talk to each other and send the
HTML documents back and forth
depending on the URLs.
Um. So, when he built it, there were some
very important things that he built into this system
that didn't exist before.
And the main one is
universal authorship.
So he always intended that anyone would be able
to access these webpages,
and anyone would be able to
add their own webpages, without
asking for permission.
With the very explicit special condition
that anyone can link to any other webpage
without permission.
Previous hypertext systems required that
basically, for you to link to me,
I have to accept that link, and
probably create a link back to you, and
that wasn't required on the Web, which
gives us a lot of freedom to link to people
who wouldn't want us to be able to link to them, for example,
so no one can say "I'm putting up free content..."
"...but you can't send your readers here, because I hate you," et cetera.
The other one is that he made it completely, completely free.
So in the world of inter--[fumbles for words]--programming
the most free thing is generally considered
to be the GPL [General Public License]: open-source, free software licenses.
uh, and Tim Berners-Lee actually almost used
the GPL, because he wanted the web software
he was building to be free.
But at the last minute he actually changed his mind
and made it full public domain, because in certain ways
the GPL is actually more restrictive, because it
forces other people - like, certain commercial actors
wouldn't have wanted to use web technology
if it were GPL, so he made it full public domain,
and then from there went on to make all of the standards
as open and, uh, general and free as possible.
Uh. So that's my extremely brief history of the internet.
If anyone is curious, he wrote a wonderful book
called "Weaving the Web" about his experiences
[enticing tone] As you can see, it's short!
And he has lots of interesting technical information
in it, without being overwhelming.
It's very approachable
and he's a really interesting person
and it - the book is much better than his tweets,
which are usually incoherent.
[one of the participants huffs out a "whew"]
Ellery: Ouch! Jeremy [?]: A few minutes?
Ellery: Thanks, that was - that was great, Jer!
Ellery: I mean, I think that that helps
um, in conversations about internet policy,
and internet governance, there's a lot of emphasis
on the ability to kind of create and innovate
without permission? Like, for every
to be able to build parts of the web, and
what you just laid out for us makes it clear
how important the Web piece of the infrastructure is
for that, for that capacity to become
a real tangible thing, and somebody that - [amends] something that now
we can do - we don't have to have
technical expertise to kind of build our own spaces there.
Ellery: Um. So, I wanted to - Jeremy: So um.
Jeremy: If I could add just one more thing, sorry -
Jeremy: I just wanted to give a couple examples
of things that happen over the internet
that aren't the web,
because that was the actual initial question.
So, one example would be torrents,
where you're the - two computers connect to each other,
and stream information directly, without any URLs
being mixed into the process.
Um, another one is - email, at its core,
is its own communication protocol
that doesn't have to use the web,
although we often use web sites to access and manage our email.
Umm. And then another one was the one right before the Web came out,
a very popular protocol was called Gopher,
which people liked, and sort of worked like the Web
- you surf around and find things -
but it actually became commercial right around the time that the web came out,
so people would've had to start paying,
and instead of starting to pay,
they switched to HTTP, HTML, and the World Wide Web.
Ellery: Thank you.
Ellery: So I want to move to Alan, now... Um,
Alan built the first search engine.
And I'm kind of... like, overwhelmed, and feel sort of
like, giddy and nervous having him here.
Ellery: This is just - [Alan laughs]
Ellery: This is, like, a really big deal!
Ellery: So, Alan, just - if you could tell us -
'cuz I think a lot of people don't know about Archie -
um, it would be really cool just to hear
about how you sort of - what you were doing
that made you decide to, to do this
and kinda what it was like, and then, I mean, everything you've seen since...
Unfortunately we're time limited, but...
Alan: Right. Ellery: You know.
Alan [coughs]: Well, um, uh, well, that was back in
1989, and, I was working as a system administrator
for uh, McGill University - I was a grad student
for McGill University - and um, I was responsible
for getting software for - one of my responsibilities
was getting software for the faculty and the students.
And at the time, the three major protocols on the internet
- this was pre Web, ummm -
was, uh, Telnet, which would allow you to log in
to a remote machine.
Email, ah, which would allow you to communicate
ah, with another - as we do now, with a, with a
remote machines, plural,
and, and FTP, which was the File Transfer Protocol,
which allowed you to move, ah, data files, or files
from one machine to another.
And at the time what we had was - people had made
- remember it was a non-commercial internet at the time -
- actually, commercial traffic was forbidden on the internet at the time,
because it was run by the National Science Foundation
and it was using educational money
and therefore other than companies with
research arms, like IBM and HP and those kinds of things,
we didn't have any commercial traffic on the internet,
which nowadays seems kind of amazing to even think about -
and, ah, so what people did, were to provide
to provide free space on their machines
- and remember, you know, at the time,
a big disc would be a megabyte, you know -
and so people would provide common repositories
that you could deposit programs that you had written
datafiles, and documents, and that kinda stuff.
into these central repositories that were
spread around the internet.
Then other people could then retrieve them.
And so I spent a lot of my time trying to locate
software, or the information that my, the students and the faculty were trying to find,
and I got tired of it.
and since I'm lazy and a geek, I...
I automated the process.
I got - instead of doing it manually, I had a bunch
of scripts wake up in the middle of the night every night,
and go out and index files.
Now remember all of this was just file listings.
It's not like Google, it's not like a search engine would be today,
it is just... filenames. All it was, was filenames.
And so what it would do
was it would go out every night,
list all the filenames in all the repositories,
and allow you to search lists of filenames.
And I only used it for myself!
I only used it, um, uh, for my own personal use.
Um, and at one point my boss,
who was also a student, a grad student
at the University, let Peter Deutsch let it be known
that, um, somebody was asking for, you know,
could they, could somebody tell them where, um,
y'know, a particular piece of software was.
And, uh, uh, we, um, uh... we, you know,
he came and asked me, he knew we had this database
and he came and asked me if I could help out.
And I gave it to him, and if, y'know,
half a sec- half a minute later I had the information,
and so he put this posting online, and, umm.
People then started asking,
"Well, can you find this for me?"
And, you know, all these manual requests!
Basically - either through email, or UseNet postings -
- which is what we were using at the time -
we thought, this is silly,
there's no point doing these things manually
when we can just allow people access to the database itself.
And in a moment of insanity,
we had to come up with a name for it,
and I said, "Okay, well, let's just call it ARCHI,"
which is "ARCHIVE" without the V
And, ah, and within about three or four months
we were consuming about half
of all of the traffic to eastern Canada [where McGill University is]
as this search engine became - as people, y'know -
- word of mouth -
you know, people who know about Archie
are generally people of a certain age...
...I won't mention what that age is, but
it's generally people who were in university
or working on the internet, so it would have been
so it would have been research people,
people in academia in the early nineties.
So Archie lasted for about, uh, [hems and haws]
Five years. Four or five years.
And, um, it only indexed FTP archives.
It never indexed the web.
Now, I went on, as Archie became popular,
and I got more involved in the standards process
and that kind of stuff,
I worked, uh, fairly closely with Tim Berners-Lee
to, uh, to standardize - for example,
I did the - I ran the committee
at the standard-setting body for the internet,
which is the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force]
to standardize URLs.
Because Tim had come up with
a set of rules for URLS,
and as we looked at expanding that
to a larger range of resources,
we realized that those rules did not cover
all of the cases.
So, we worked, for, uh - Tim brought the,
the specification, his original specification,
to the group, and we worked on it for,
I don't remember, nine months to a year or so,
to come up with a standard for URLs.
So all of those URLs that we use,
day in and day out,
were, were standardized as a result
of that committee.
So, it was, um, it was a really exciting time,
it was a time of, y'know - the question I always get
is why didn't make a billion dollars off of it?
And I keep reminding people
most of the people who were pioneers -
with the exception of Mark Andreessen
uhm, didn't make a whole lot of money off of these.
these original things.
We were working in an environment which, uh,
put a premium on getting the technology out there
making it as widely available as possible -
Tim's big coup with CERN,
which is the organization that he worked for
when he first developed the web
was to get CERN to put, um, the web software
that he had created into the public domain.
So it wasn't even his to give away,
it was CERN's property.
As an employee [of CERN], [Tim's work] would actually belong to CERN.
Uh. He, he actually convinced them to put it in the public domain
and that's what really, uh, y'know
set [amends] lit a fire under the whole thing.
At the time, the philosophy behind it
was really, "Let's get this out there,
"..this is a brave new world,"
"..we don't know what all of this technology's gonna be used for!"
I don't think any of us - including Tim -
imagined what it would become.
Y'know, he always had a much grander vision of it
but I don't - I can guarantee you -
I've spent many, many, many, many an hour
with drinks, in bars, drinking with Tim,
and I can guarantee you that he did not
- Sir Tim, by the way, Sir Tim -
Um. I should - y'know, he even, he,
I don't think, had any idea that it would basically
take over the world.
and half the world's population would be using
the system that he created, twenty years later. [corrects himself] Twenty-five years later.
Ellery: Thank you so much.
Ellery: I mean, so, speaking of which, yeah,
it has changed, and, I guess, taken over, in a way,
um, that we, I'm sure, wouldn't have expected.
I wanted to now move to Josh and Renata,
who are both [something falls to the floor]
very [she looks at the fallen object, winces]
committed, involved leaders in what has now
become a global effort to - I mean,
the way that we're sort of putting it
is "save the internet"
or, preserve and protect the openness
of all of the rights to free expression, access, um,
and also privacy, that we all feel are embedded
actually, in the way that it was built.
So, Josh, I wondered if you could explain to us
really briefly what your role is in your organization
and then also, um, tell us about
the Web We Want campaign, and explain, y'know,
how you think this rights movement is shaping up
and if you could kind of link it with everything that
Alan just laid out for us,
that would be really wonderful.
Josh Levy: I'll do my best.
Josh: So, my name is Josh Levy,
Josh: I'm from Free Press,
we're a U.S.-based organization,
we advocate for better technology and media policy
that allows for an open internet,
for better representation
of people in the media, including media that's online,
and for open access to information.
And this issue that we're talking about -
the anniversary of the web -
is really central to our work,
because we've been fighting, for example,
to pass strong Net Neutrality policies here in the U.S. for years.
Basically ever since the issue first came up, in the mid-2000s,
when we saw big internet service providers
blocking traffic coming from certain destinations.
And that fight is ongoing.
The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission
here in the U.S., is charged with overseeing communications and technology policy,
passed rules in 2010
that were intended to protect Net Neutrality
but were passed in a way that we knew wasn't gonna hold up in court.
And we were - unfortunately, we saw that happen
when a court in Washington, D.C., threw out those rules,
effectively throwing out any Net Neutrality protections that people have.
And so this gets back to what Jeremy was saying
the "internet" versus the "Web," right?
So when we're talking about Net Neutrality,
which I hope a lot of people have heard of,
this concept that we should be able to access any information that we want online
without anybody getting in the way, whether that's a big company or the government -
that is, essentially, that's a policy that applies to
to the ways in which all of our computers connect to each other.
And we have this basic understanding that the internet should be free and open,
meaning that my computer should be able to connect
to yours in this global network of computers
without any entity inspecting the traffic,
trying to understand what you're trying to access,
and, based on that understanding, block it.
So if it doesn't like the video you're watching, [it would be] slowing it down;
or, if it doesn't like the application you're using, blocking it -
- that, that should be totally unacceptable.
We should be able to connect to whatever we want in whatever way we want.
And that includes using the Web, right?
So the Web is basically an application
The internet's this global network,
the Web is just one application that uses this global network.
And so it's essential - Net Neutrality is essential to using the web,
because as we've seen today,
using the web is so essential to all of our lives
and big companies, and governments, have so much power over it that they can block all kinds of things:
political speech, videos that we wanna watch, pictures of cats, et cetera.
So. Um, anyway, so that's what Free Press is doing,
in large part, trying to protect that notion of Net Neutrality.
And out of that fight came a number of campaigns,
including the campaign to stop SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act]
- which was the bad copyright bill a couple years ago here in the U.S. -
and out of that came a realization, I think,
here in the U.S. but [also] around the world,
that we all needed to kind of talk to each other a little bit more.
those of us who have been advocating for a free and open internet for a long time.
And so we started doing that:
Free Press led the development the drafting of
something called the "Declaration of Internet Freedom"
which was a simple statement of principles about our right to access information online.
And out of that came a really fruitful relationship with Tim Berners-Lee's organization,
- the World Wide Web Foundation -
and we discussed ways in which we could move that effort forward,
this Declaration effort,
to involve more groups around the world, more people around the world,
and to guarantee that we all have access to information
and that that access, and the principles behind it,
are not the domain of any one country, or any one group of individuals.
So, out of that came this great project, the Web We Want,
which Renata's gonna tell you more about.
which is seeking to do just that:
to pass laws, around the world, that will protect people's right to access the internet
and to access content on the Web without anybody getting in the way,
and, uh, it's building steam very, very quickly -
we are working with countries around the world to develop their own set of principles
regarding the web and our rights on it,
and organizing lots and lots of organizations that are really excited about getting involved in this effort
and our dream of uniting groups who are all fighting the same fight but in different parts of the world
is kind of coming to life.
So, I'll let Renata tell you more about that.
Renata Avila: Eum, hello everyone, everybody,
it's really good to be here?
Renata: Ah, so: Web We Want.
The Web We Want is a coalition of [gestures as she searches for words]
very important groups of organizations from [unintelligible] society
Ah, I will mention [some] of them:
Access, that many of us are familiar with; [AccessNow.org]
APC; [Association for Progressive Communications]
Free Press;
7iber, in Jordan; the Open Source Association, in Jordan as well;
[ums and ers]
Consumers International; Article 19; Fundação Getulio Vargas, in Brazil;
IT for Change, in India; Public Knowledge, in the U.S.;
and we, we have a - we got the confirmation that Open Knowledge Foundation,
which has affiliates all over the world, will join as well.
So, basically, the campaign...
..what we are trying to achieve here
is to move from the reactions,
the constant reactions to the civil society we have,
to a proactive approach.
To have a positive agenda, to have the safe [??] first, in different countries.
And also globally [??]
And what happens is usually that we come together last minute -
we react to bad legislation being proposed,
by either specific [interest groups], or a very creative but not so well informed legislator...
And so, in the last, let's say, five years,
we have seen so many mobilizations against, against, against.
So we think that yes, it's good to have a reaction to bad legislation,
but it's much more effective to have a proposal coming from civil society.
And not only - like, civil society understood as a -
a more extended way [than] we usually use in [discussions of] internet governance -
but civil society involving everyone in a fight for our rights.
And so we have different activities and different actions to achieve that.
The first would be intense work in specific countries where we [gestures]
together, all the advisory committee, so that there's something going on,
some movement in civil society, and there's some action there.
So, the list of the countries that we have decided will be like the first "grant-ees" [i.e. recipients]
of um, more stronger support from the punt [???] where we want manages [???] will be:
Japan, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, the U.K., Tunisia, Nigeria, Kenya...
...and South Africa.
So, as you see, it's mostly countries of the global south.
Also the U.K., because we saw an opportunity there,
and we also saw a regression of rights.
It is very interesting to see how the deterioration of rights in a country -
- even in a democratic country -
in the last ten years, has been very extreme.
And this is really affecting the region.
Apart from this intense work that we are planning to do, having national dialogues in these countries,
I have informed you of,
we have also - we are launching, on the 21st of March, a mini-grant round.
The mini-grants are for everyone to apply, so you don't need to be an NGO
so you don't need to be an NGO, you don't need to be an expert to apply for these grants.
What we want is normal people -
- artists, musicians, everyone -
to be involved in this and [unintelligible] to celebrate, to party for the Web!
But at the same time celebrate the Web, we start a conversation on what is the web we want?
What is - [struggles for words]
- which values, which form we want, which way we want to protect the Web in our countries.
The free and open Web.
And so it can be as simple as a screening in a public space?
It can be more elaborate, like a talk at your local library?
It can be anything you want, it can be even a sculpture in the middle of a city.
ah, telling people what the Web represents [means] to you.
But also, we know that we cannot abandon those fighting "against."
So we have rapid response grants.
And these rapid response grants are for, ehh -
we, we have identified that sometimes to make something happen, you need some resources.
Especially in some countries in the global south.
So. For example, ehh, think about a very bad surveillance law.
about to be passed in, oh, Nicaragua.
So, this rapid response -
- which will be open during the whole year -
- will allow activists to say, "Hey, listen. This very bad thing is happening..."
"..and we think that if we gather a group of people together, and we print, uh, leaflets..."
"..and we make a short video about it, we have a good chance to shift the opinions to our side."
"The side of right."
And so that will be open as well, that will be open on the 21st of March, and remain open the whole year.
And what we will achieve at the end of the year is a very interesting collection of experiences.
We will see that - [finds her words]
what is the Web people want, in the specific countries,
with more intense follow-up mechanism and dialogue.
We will also see which techniques are the best for rapid response
when there's a threat to the open internet.
by the collection of experiences from the rapid response grants.
And also we will learn from ways to engage the broader public in our topics and in our issues.
So I am very hopeful that especially artists, or very creative activists,
will find ways to engage the broader public.
Because we need - this is ours.
The future of [the open internet] depends on us preserving it.
And the more people invited to this fight, the stronger we get.
At last, I will... I would like to invite everyone to be engaged the way that you can engage.
And to apply for these grants!
But not only to apply for these grants - to make things your own.
If you want to write an article, if you are an expert on specific topics,
please write articles, please share your knowledge with people,
and please engage, and don't be apathetic.
Because the Web offers us -
- and the internet offers us -
- this opportunity to communicate and connect beyond borders,
and I think that, slowly, we are building this platform -
- which is not a website but is a platform made of [amends her description] collective –
- that is ready to jump and to take actions to save the web any moment that it is under threat.
So. Yes. That's it.
Ellery [laughs]: Thanks.
Ellery: It's really - I think it's great to sort of, to have that out there,
for people to understand all the ways that they can get involved.
One thing I - so, in thinking about how can we make a little show today that would celebrate the web,
I couldn't help but think about Global Voices,
because that's what brings us all together here,
and, I think that our community, in so many ways -
I mean, we couldn't exist, wouldn't exist, without the Web,
but there are also so many particular attributes of it,
when it comes to access and openness,
that allow us to do all the things that we do,
like, including this hangout, right now.
Um. So I wanted to ask -
- although we're really short on time -
Jer, you, I kind of, I said, is there...
...could you talk a little bit about what, if you look at Global Voices,
and sort of the way that it's grow up, um, with the internet -
- you've been here since the beginning,
so you can kind of - just, just tell us a bit.
Jeremy Clark: Okay, well, uh,
Jeremy: I actually haven't been with Global Voices since the very beginning,
but I joined near the start.
So, maybe you can see on my screen -
- Global Voices was started in 2005, um,
and one of the great things about the story is that it was started quickly and easily by Ethan Zuckerman
who set up the original site, uh,
along with Rebecca McKinnon, who worked on the idea and the content,
and so, they actually used WordPress, which is the system we still use today,
and which is very similar to the Web in a lot of senses
because it's a distributed project,
people all around the world develop it,
it's open-source, free,
(and it is [free] not by convenience but very explicit philosophy and they're very active in defending that)
and also in another way: uh, originally, at the time,
there was a very popular free software called Movable Type
and instead of starting to pay for it, people switched to Wordpress.
So, this was our original website.
We later redesigned it several times.
And over the years, we have grown with WordPress
to take advantage of the new features... um.
[gestures] - keep running our site.
And so running our whole infrastructure on this very decentralized open-source model has been
a really rewarding experience for us, just as using the Web has.
And obviously, the, uh, one of the most interesting things is that
Global Voices is all about the web.
Without the Web, without that decentralized authorship,
- anyone can write to it -
there would be no Global Voices.
Uh, the whole point of global voices was to
recognize that people all over the world
were taking advantage of the benefits of the Web,
and create one place where you could find it,
sort of like Archie was with the pre-Web TelNet days
a archive of things happening all around -
- that's what Global Voices did.
Um. So. Yeah!
And, y'know, we've tried a lot of different
infrastructure based around the web over the years;
uh, we've used Drupal,
we've used a lot of different online services,
obviously, like everyone else,
the temptation to take advantage of Google's
free offerings has always been part of Global Voices' DNA,
we use Google mailing lists,
we use all the different things that they make for free
which is an interesting part of the web,
because it's not the Web, that's Google,
just happening to give it away,
but as a company, they have a tendency
to follow the spirit of the Web, uh,
even though they're doing so for commercial reasons.
But - yeah!
That's my very brief summary
of the history of Global Voices
and how it parallels the Web!
Ellery: Thank you!
Ellery: I'm afraid we're gonna have to wrap up now
but, just, to do that, I wanted to ask for
a couple of, kind of, final thoughts...
...from Alan, and perhaps also Josh, just -
- Alan, I guess I'm especially interested in
if there are, kinda, thoughts that you have
on all of the activism and advocacy
that's taking place around fundamental rights on the Internet,
from your own unique historical perspective.
And then I wanted to close, um,
by asking Renata to just tell us a very little bit about Bassel
since there's also an important anniversary this weekend.
So, I'm gonna just let you guys go,
and then we will close out!
Alan Emtage: Okay, well, y'know,
Alan: I haven't been involved as an activist
for, uh, for quite some time now.
I sort of burnt out after a while! [laughs]
- flying around the globe, and doing all the stuff that I did in the nineties.
But I certainly pay a lot of attention to that stuff
y'know, I'm currently involved in Barbados, right now,
and it has been really interesting to try and,
for one example,
try and access content from the United States
- entertainment content, that kind of stuff.
And, I mean, I knew about this stuff in theory,
but in practice, the antiquated models
of content distribution that we're still holding onto
in this day and age,
where, you know, geographical boundaries and national boundaries and that kinda stuff
are still very much at the center of these business models.
Y'know, things like BitTorrent and that kinda stuff
are wiping them away, and they don't even realize it.
The music industry has seen this happen, now, for decades -
Certainly from the activist point of view,
in terms of keeping the Internet free and available,
it's gonna be a real challenge.
And, I mean, it's such an important technology now.
You have things like the Great Firewall in China...
You have, you know, Russia, who recently -
- as of yesterday, today -
- shutting down, using new laws to shut down access to dissent against Putin...
They realize the power -
- Egypt was a real wakeup call for a lot of people in the use of social networking
to organize and activate people and bring them out onto the streets,
so governments are scared of this technology
and it's important that we work really hard
to keep it as free as it is,
because they realize that, you know,
information - how you control the information, you control the people.
So, um, I think it is extraordinarily important
that people like Josh [unintelligible]
continue to work very hard to stop the bad laws,
to inform the legislators -
- some of them are just doing it out of ignorance!
I mean, you know,
"Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence."
And, uh, a lot of these people are just
incompetent, not malicious.
But there are people who are malicious, as well [laughing a bit]
so we have to deal with them as well.
But, um, you know, it's vitally important
because, uh, nowadays, these technologies
really sit at the core of our culture
and the way that we communicate with one another.
[long silence]
Josh [wondering if he should speak next]: ...Me?
[Josh laughs silently]
Josh: I'll just add one thing real quickly -
- I think that we're at an interesting moment
where so many of us acknowledge the importance of the Internet and the Web,
and the impact that it's had on every aspect of our culture,
and because of that,
I think we as the users of the Web, and of the Internet, have a duty
to hold governments around the world and companies around the world accountable
and to urge them and pressure them
to protect the openness that lies at the core of this entire thing.
And to protect, not just openness, but
also this notion of a Commons.
That's - in our opinion - quickly being lost.
This notion that the Internet, and the Web, are publicly owned,
and that the activity that takes place on them
is activity that we undertake
and that is ours.
And that is not the domain of the big companies' platforms.
We undertake the activity.
So, for example,
Google has allowed us to do a lot of things.
Google allows us to find information extremely quickly,
to connect to each other extremely well,
to use Google Hangouts as we're doing right now,
but Google's doing all of this at the -
- while mining the data that we give it, selling off that data -
- that data is also creating historical record
of everything that we search for and say online,
which as we know, can be exploited by governments,
- but also by companies -
and I think it's time for us to think about that relationship
between us and these big companies,
which is becoming the central part of our online experience.
And how can we decentralize that?
How can we decouple ourselves from these giant companies
and take back a portion of the Web
so that we own this experience in a deeper way
and it's not experienced as purely commercial,
a commercial transaction between us an a big company.
So that's a big question,
and it's going to take years to unravel it, to find solutions,
but we're hoping that we can start that conversation now.
[long silence]
Renata: Well, now I will go back to something that Jeremy said.
It was about someone stopping him at the border, the Canadian border,
because of "hacker."
And what I want to talk about is that,
at the end of the day,
we reduce the number of people who can actually,
in some countries, not control the internet,
but understand the infrastructure, and use it in a way that they can increase public good.
and they can help people in extreme situations.
And one of these people is my friend Bassel Khartabil -
[fondly] Bassel, Bassel is the internet. Basically.
Basel is Palestinian-Syrian activist,
he's an activist of Greek culture,
and he's a global citizen.
He's not super nationalistic, you know,
he has traveled a lot, extensively,
he has friends all over the world,
and he likes to spend time learning how things work, how things operate,
so he's very good with computers -
he [taught] himself how to code, thanks to his uncle -
He knows a lot about hardware as well,
and he knows a lot about Greek culture and design.
And so during his travels he saw all these wonderful things happening
and so he decided, with a group of friends,
to create a hackerspace in Damascus
I don't know how translation works,
but apparently "hacker-space" is a very scary word for the civilian intelligence service,
and they saw it as a threat -
people in power saw technology as a threat
to their plan to control people.
So on the 15th of December, two years ago,
the hacker-space was raided...
All the computers were taken away,
all the things were dismantled -
- can you imagine one of these Syrian police looking at the 3D printer, oh my god,
they probably thought they were like nuclear weapons, or something -
and, sadly, he has been away, he has been in prison.
He has been in a very, very bad prison subject to torture treatment.
But then he was - thanks to the advocacy of thousands of people,
he was transferred back to the civilian prison.
Which, you can imagine, if you have seen a civilian prison, how bad it looks like.
I mean, it is... the conditions get from bad to worse as time goes by,
as the Syrian government runs out of resources.
The last people they will feed, the last people they will take care of, are the prisoners.
On top of that, Bassel, he has a health condition...
It is all really sad.
But, what we have been trying to do during these two years
is to keep him peaceful.
And to keep reminding him that we haven't forgotten
and to keep reminding him that we embrace the values that he embrace.
And we support the causes that he supports.
So, instead of, you know, just being sad, and doing nothing,
we are a doing a Free Bassel Day.
On the 15th of March.
Well, some things are already starting today!
And what we want is, ah, joint action -
- doing things, doing anything you can do to remember Bassel.
And not only Bassel. To remember Syria.
Because it seems that because of the news,
we just, we don't hear about Syria anymore!
I mean, it's like, we might hear it on the [radio, while we're in] the parking lot,
and if we have some time, we go, "oh, okay, something is going badly there."
But, uh, we seem to have forgotten about all the suffering.
And together with Bassel there are
lots of system administrators, computer experts, and hackers who are in prison,
and sometimes we only care about journalists!
But, you know, there's lots of people, valuable people for the future of Syria,
who are in prison now, who need our solidarity.
I will also - if you live in a country which has received Syrian refugees,
please show solidarity.
I know that sharing your computer might not sound appealing,
but maybe crowdfunding and giving a computer with internet access to this refugee camp
so they can stay in touch with their relatives abroad...?
Maybe doing a short talk or short gathering near them...?
I think that those are good ways to help Bassel.
Because that's what Bassel probably would be doing if he was free.
So my appeal is that - to not forget Syria, to not forget Bassel.
The free internet is a free internet with free Bassel and free Syria!
And that's - the Web I want, actually!
Ellery: That is the Web she wants!
Ellery: The Web many of us want.
So, there's a lot of work to do,
and there are lots of ways to get involved, as we've heard about.
Thank you, everybody, so much
for coming on today,
and we hope to see everybody here and out there on GV Face!
Thanks so much!