GV Face: Happy 25th Birthday, Web!

It's the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web this week! In this edition of GV Face, Global Voices veterans will talk about their early experiences with the web and all it has enabled us to do in our (nearly) ten years as an organization. We'll also speak with GV community leader Renata Avila and Free Press Internet Campaign Director Josh Levy, two founding members of the Web We Want campaign, a new initiative that promotes global conversation about human rights and the Internet.

Our weekly video hangout series!

I think - let's see, we started a little bit off time

so I'll say it again:

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!