State of Mozilla: Harvey Anderson's- ''Health of the Web Report''

Harvey Anderson, SVP of Business and Legal Affairs for Mozilla, demonstrates the health of the Web and the importance of building trust during the 2013 Mozilla Summit.

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You know 10 years ago when there was one browser,

it was really easy to know what to do.

It was also easy to see the problem, right?

You know, there's one browser.

IE controls the web. We know all the things that happen when you have a world like that.

So, ... today it's a lot more complicated.

It's hard to actually see the problem and to see what the success is.

The the idea was "hmm" could we figure out

some set of signs or, attributes or, values, that we could start to watch and look at.

To figure out how healthy the web is;

and, how healthy, how successful we may be at our mission.

And we could talk a little bit about or, for actually a long time about:

what the definition of the web is;

and, what's the difference between Open Web and Open Internet.

We could have that discussion but, for today, let's try and skip over that part.

And, just think of two things, at least [that's] the way I've framed it, or at least I think of it.

There are those principles that underlie the internet.

The core principles [from] when the internet was created that you've heard folks talk about.

And then, over time, [those] that really dealt with: the telecommunications; the bits;

the interoperability; the decentralisation; the net neutrality;

the permissive publishing idea; the redundancy parts;

the parts that make the internet work.

But then over time with the web, some other things have started to grow on top of that.

It's developed more values and attributes.

And as Tim Berners-Lee called it, the ultimate attribute is universality.

We posited that there might be some vital signs, that might indicate the health of the web.

I mean, if you were a doctor, you're going to look at a couple of signs to figure out whether you're healthy or not.

So the idea being for the purposes of today, let's just pick some that we thought were important indicators.

So let's start with access.

How many people are online?

From what we can tell right now,

it looks like only a third of the people in the world are online.

And then the distribution of that third, it's not too even.

If you have a disability, the internet is really not set up for you.

And that's something that I think Mozilla is a particular steward for and can be.

Let's talk about interoperability for a little bit.

On the browser side.

That's a pretty good state. Browsers are relatively competitive.

Content freedom, also known as net neutrality or, content neutrality or,

the principle of non-discrimination for the internet.

How's that doing?

Well, largely good but, there're some outliers.

We've seen in past three years, greater attempts to restrict content on the internet at national level.

User choice and control.

So on the browser side there's lots of choice for users today.

On the mobile side, not so much.

Economic activity. Advertising powers the web.

That's the largest form of economic activity on the web.

App sales is largely on the mobile side, right?

Finally I wanted to look at what we may call a trust metric.

And this a hard one. Some of these are quantitative and some are qualitative.

And on the trust side, it's not doing well. We've all been dancing around this idea of trust but,

that's something that's really important, that goes to the health of the web,

and that we talk about that, we do lots of things around that.

Transparency is a form that leads to trust. We work on that all the time.

So, why don't we try to measure those things?

Let's figure out how we could create something that is more ongoing and more formal.

And perhaps have kind of like the Mary Meeker of the Open Internet Report.

If Mozilla couldn't do that, who could?

Why wouldn't it be us to do that?