 So Michael Nielsen, thank you so much for taking the time and we welcome you to Qatar. And thank you for joining us yesterday for ICD-Cutters Connected Speaker Series. And first we'd like to know, you started saying, your speech by saying that the internet is like an adolescent. So why do you think so? Well I think the best thing is to look at how the internet has developed so far and project into the future and realize that we're only about 15% of the way through the development of the internet. And we're still figuring out how to use it. It's very early. I compare the internet to an adolescent because like an adolescent, the internet is at a critical point in its growth. The teenager has many different options. They get to decide if they're going to go to college, what they're going to grow up to be, how hard they're going to work. They have all these choices ahead of them and they have to make those choices and may define the next 30 or 40 or 50 years of their life. And that's where we are with the internet today. If we make the right choices, the internet will continue to grow as explosively as it has. It will continue to have these new innovative uses for it. If we make the wrong choices, it'll be like a teenager who goes off the path and kind of limits its future. Okay. So you said that people are what makes technology develop and not the hardware. So why do you think so? Well with the internet in particular, the technology is so powerful and so flexible. Many different things we can do. It's up to people to decide what we're going to do. And the marketplace, the vendors, the network providers, they all have a role in deciding which of the different possible technological futures we embrace. And that's why I focus on the people. It's also true that the people are the slower piece of the puzzle. The technology moves ahead at this ever accelerating pace, but people can only assimilate so much technology. They can only learn so many things in a given day or a given year. And so that's, I think, what slows down the greater utilization of the new applications we're developing. Okay. So you mentioned three phases of the internet. So for those who didn't attend the session, can you elaborate on each? Well the first phase of the internet was simply email and remote access to computers. This was the one-to-one phase of the internet. One person talking to one machine, one person sending an email to one other person. That's what we did from 1969 until about 1992, one-to-one. Then we had the one-to-many phase made possible by the web. And now a single web server could provide content to hundreds of people or thousands of people at the same time, much more like a broadcast medium. And as a result, in the mid-90s, we saw a 100 times increase in the amount of traffic on the internet in just two years. We're going through a similar increase now as we go to the cloud. This is a many-to-many medium where many people with many machines are interacting simultaneously with many other people and many different parts of the internet. And you can imagine how much more traffic that's going to generate because thousands of people are interacting with thousands of other services and people all at the same time. And that's leading to another big acceleration in the growth of network traffic. The other piece of this is that we're adding in tens of millions of new sensors and new appliances and smartphones, all these new things that are connecting to the net. So it's not just about computers anymore. In a year, it's going to be a fact that we have more things that aren't computers connected to the internet than we have PCs. So what's the internet of things? The internet of things is a nice, crisp phrase for describing what some people call M-to-M, machine-to-machine. It's about simple devices, often 50-cent devices that can provide data to the internet. That data can be then collected and processed and combined and analyzed. This will be helpful for environmental monitoring, for traffic monitoring, for security, for agriculture. You can imagine a field with thousands of sensors all embedded in the ground with small wireless antennas so that they can report on the humidity in the ground and the amount of fertilizer and allow the farmers to precisely tune the amount of water that they provide to the field. That's just one example. Another funny example I just read about in The Economist, the latest issue, talked about how in the future your carpet will have sensors embedded in it. So if someone, an elderly person, is walking across the carpet and they're stumbling or they're not walking the way they normally do, the carpet would automatically call the doctor and report that there may be a problem, that the patient may be having a stroke or may be dehydrated. These are all possibilities that we can do today. In the future, millions of people will be doing it and all these different pieces of data from all these different sensors will be feeding into the cloud. Why is the internet a cheap revolution in your point of view? The cheap revolution is a nice term that allows us to focus on the dramatic reduction in the cost of computing made possible by online services, open source software, more easy to maintain systems, and also some new tools like the cloud that give us ready access to data that normally would have been very hard to get. So this is leading to about a 90% reduction in the cost of computing and making it much easier for startup internet companies to launch a new company, to provide a new service. Companies are getting started in a week or two. Five years ago it would have taken six months to do the same thing. So we talked about the internet of things. The second thing we also mentioned is the exaflux. So what is it? Is it really important or is it just a bus term? Well, it's a nice term to focus attention on this overwhelming amount of data that we're now creating. A lot of it's useless data. It's videos of cute cats and baby pictures that only grandma wants to see. But the quantity of data that we're now producing, particularly with the better high resolution video, is extraordinary. We're doubling the amount of data. This year we will create twice as much data on the internet as all the previous years up to this point. That's going to lead to the possibility of exabytes and even zettabytes of data. This zettabyte is a thousand billion, billion bytes of data. That's a lot of data. And making sense of it is now our challenge. Twenty years ago our challenge was to get data, get information. We were in an information scarce environment. Now it's just the opposite. We're flooded with information. Our challenge is to find what we need. And that is the real opportunity, I think, for the media, for educators, for government. It's helping people find what they need to do their job and to live a better life. Okay, so how do you think content copyright, the issues about content copyright will change in the future? Will they be as important or will people start overlooking it? Well, I think copyright's here and we have a lot of business models built on copyright. But what's fascinating is the whole new world of free content and content that's in the public domain, which is creating new business models, which involve giving away your data and finding new ways to provide revenue. So if you're a musician, you might give away your music online because it's almost free to do that. And then you'll make money by selling t-shirts, by having online chats with your fans, and of course by selling tickets to your concerts. It may not generate as much revenue as if you were able to be a star and control the top 40 year after year. But I think the fact that it's so much easier to produce a record and to distribute a record means that we're going to have a lot more music out there competing for the number one spot. It's now a lot easier to be the number one record. You don't have to sell as many records because there's so much diversity. Chris Anderson has talked about the long tail. And in music that's certainly the case now, where everybody can be a rock star, they just can't sell many records. So they do have to find a way to build a community around their music. First at the local level doing local concerts and then eventually doing tours, doing web streaming, doing concerts online. There's a lot of new opportunities that allow the musician to go directly to their fans and find new ways to generate revenue. So in this part of the interview we'd like to discuss some of the issues regarding cloud computing. So first we'd like to know is it really a game changer and third phase of the internet that we're living in or is it overrated? Well, I don't think it's possible to underrate cloud computing. It's very much like the web was in the early 1990s. I like to say that the cloud today is about where the worldwide web was in 1994. It's hard to remember back that far but at that point we had the technology, the standards had been developed, we had the mosaic browser and the first websites were being created. There were only a few thousand of them. But we could see even at that point that this was going to change the way people got information and the way they interacted with each other. It was going to change commerce, education, business. And certainly it was going to change entertainment. We didn't know how but we could see the opportunity and we could see the power of the technology. The basic platform was there. That's where we are today with the cloud. We have these new powerful ways to do things by using services that are in the internet rather than on your desktop. And we're starting to combine them in new ways. New business models are developed. We're seeing this radical reduction in the cost of computing made possible by cloud computing. But we have no idea how creative people are going to dream up to do with this new resource. But I guarantee you it's going to just be game-changing. It's going to create new industries. It's going to disrupt a lot of industries. People will lose jobs and have to be trained for new jobs. The good news will be higher-paying jobs. There will be more of them because you'll have more power, more data, more computing potential. When we discuss cloud computing there are always privacy and security concerns. This is the first question I get asked when I talk about the cloud. People can understand when their data is on their laptop. They know that there's threats. They know that they have to take action to make sure that their data is secure. They have a harder time understanding how their data will be secure if it's on someone else's data center. In a data center they don't even know about because it's just out in the cloud. But I argue that there's a much better chance of providing strong security in the cloud which is being run by the world's best engineers which is protected by several layers of security. That's going to be a lot easier to secure than millions of individual laptops that are being maintained and run by people who don't really care or understand the intricacies of computer security. There's millions of machines out there that we know are compromised today. Now, if we can use simpler, more secure machines to access the cloud we can and we know that the cloud is secure because we have the best engineers in the world working on that problem and we have monitoring and auditing built into the system. I think we can improve our security. It'll never be perfect. We should resist the temptation that it has to be perfect before we start using it. It just has to be somewhat better than what we've got today which is unfortunately quite insecure. Also, when you speak about cloud computing people ask about the data availability especially when they shift service providers. Again, compared to what you've got all of us know somebody who's had a hard drive crash lost family pictures and lost the critical email that they needed for their job. With the cloud, your data is automatically backed up in two or three different places. You still have to be connected and you have to worry about whether your network connection is going to be reliable. So many people I think will have two or three different ways to reach the network at any given time. I certainly do. I have my own fiber connection into my home I also have a broadband wireless card. So there's always some way to get connected and I also have two or three computers in case one doesn't decide not to work or my daughter drops one. This is the way you have to start living. Redundancy. Now luckily netbooks are $200. You can buy three or four of them for what it used to cost to buy a nice laptop. Okay. So speaking about the role of the government and especially since AISTEHKHAT is a government entity, we're really interested to know what role can governments play as we are shifting to the future. Well, there's a long list of things that governments should do and an even longer list of things governments should not do. Let me emphasize the first step has to be first do no harm. Don't put in place regulations that try to hold back the development of this technology. We want policies that empower the users, empower the innovators who are coming up with new uses for the technology. The most obvious thing for government to do is to be a very creative, innovative user of the technology. Be a demonstration of the power of social media, of webcasting, of virtual worlds, of sensor nets. That's what we call out a no-brainer. Clearly government has the money, they have the needs, they can lead the way in developing and pushing the development of these technologies. But more than that there needs to be effective telecommunication policy that fosters investment and competition in the IT sector. There needs to be policies that protect security. There needs to be clear rules for liability. One of the real concerns right now is that cloud service providers might be held liable for anything that their customers do with the cloud service. We don't do that for internet service providers today. If someone sends an illegal message across an email system, you don't sue the phone company or the network provider. But the cloud is even more powerful and people will find all sorts of uses for it and some of them, a small fraction of one percent will be illegal or counterproductive and people will be appalled with what people are doing with the cloud is just as some people are appalled with some of the things that people are doing with the internet. When illegal activity happens police will have to be brought in and action will be taken. But to redesign the entire internet and to redesign the entire cloud to make sure that nobody in the future ever does anything illegal would be counterproductive and would really limit all the positive things that we can do. We need international discussions about how these new systems will be developed and how users will be protected. So there's a more and more need for the kind of consultation that we see through the internet society or through the internet governance forum or through ICANN. But there's a lot of roles for government. A lot of it has to do with education helping connect the unconnected and then once they're connected helping them use these tools. It's not just about getting the technology it's about the people finding out what they can do with it. So until yesterday people who attended the session knew that CIO means chief information officer. Right. But you argued otherwise, so... Well it either means one of two things. I think it means cloud is opportunity. Okay. Which is a short way of saying the cloud is a very powerful platform that CIOs and everybody else in the company can use to develop better ways to do business. Unfortunately some of the chief information officers look at the cloud and they think career is over. Which is really unfortunate because they think that because the computing is going to be done in the cloud on some companies some other companies equipment there won't be a need for the CIO and his or her staff to maintain the computers that they maintain today. That's true, but somebody needs to maintain the software that's going to run on the cloud someone needs to help all the employees understand what's possible and because the cost of computing is going to go down so dramatically and because there's going to be these new more flexible services there's going to be a lot of opportunity for CIOs to help their company push beyond the leading edge and develop new things that they can do with the technology both for their employees and for their customers. So the smart CIOs realize this is a great opportunity it's a reason to hire more people to do more things to develop more opportunities and more applications. The resistant CIOs look at this and think I don't need to run machines anymore so my job is gone. And those people don't deserve to be employed quite frankly. So shifting to social media you said that social media got Obama elected so what is the political impact of social media and how do you think this impact will increase or decrease over the future? Well this again is part of the many to many revolution. In politics we've seen people using the web for more than 15 years. I worked at the White House in the Clinton Administration when we created WhiteHouse.gov and launched that for the first time. But that was focused on one to many broadcasting information about the White House to the world. With social media it's about all these people talking to each other and Obama was very creative in the way that he allowed his supporters to find themselves on the internet, connect together, organize their own events, advertise those events to everybody in their community and everybody around the country over a hundred thousand events were organized that way. Only a small fraction were actually sparked, instigated by the campaign. Most of these were things that people in the community decided they wanted to do. They wanted to bring together their friends and watch a speech that Obama was giving or watch the presidential debates. They wanted to go door to door knocking on doors and telling people why they should vote for Barack Obama. This was particularly important in the primary when Barack Obama was competing against Hillary Clinton to get the Democratic nomination. No one knew who he was. No one believed in him. It took all these people finding each other, giving the word out, refining the messages and sharing that with their friends and the friends of their friends. That was the magic of it. And it really does mark a critical point in the development of our politics. Just as the 1960 presidential debate on television between Nixon and Kennedy was the critical groundbreaking point in the development of television as a political medium. This election in 2008 was a critical point in the development of social media in the political sphere. So what's your take on net neutrality since it's a hot topic? Well, first you'll have to define net neutrality for me because there's at least five different definitions. The simplest definition is also the one that's completely wrong. And that is that all bits are treated alike. That every message, every electron that goes over the internet is treated exactly the same. The internet has never worked that way. There's just no way the internet could work if we did that. The more subtle definition is that all services that are similar are treated alike. And so a network provider would be allowed to treat certain types of content differently and give a higher priority for instance to a message that's reporting data on my health. We talked earlier about how your carpet might monitor your health and if someone fell down and was lying on the carpet that message should get very high priority and the doctor in the hospital or the ambulance should find out immediately. On the other hand if someone's watching reruns from a 20-year-old television program, well maybe the video in that doesn't get as high priority. Particularly if it's just a download and there's no urgency. It's just downloaded and you watch it whenever you watch it. So the question then becomes can a network provider treat some video different than other? And can they charge more for expedited service? And that's really where the argument comes in. I think we've focused too much on the details of how the network will be managed and we haven't focused enough on what the real issue is which is will consumers have lots of choices in how they get their video and how they get their broadband service? When there's lots of choices we don't have to worry about network neutrality because the network companies are all going to compete to give their customers as much content as quickly as possible and as effectively and cheaply as possible. If we have that kind of world if we have three or four or ten different ways to connect to the net we don't have to worry about this possibility that the network provider is going to filter out certain services or give an advantage to companies that they're working with. So let's focus on that problem first. In the countries where they've done that properly from Denmark to France to Hong Kong they have many different choices and all those companies that are providing service are providing the full scope of the internet and they're providing it as fast and as effectively and as cheaply as possible. For those who say that the future of internet is very vague and they want solutions that they can or more guidance for what's coming next what will you tell them briefly? That's not the internet way. The truth is the technology is getting more and more flexible we're seeing more and more services develop more and more choices and that's good. The challenge is to make sense of it all and the good news is we have more and more companies, analysts, consultants of making sense of this flood of new applications and I read the blogs I encourage people to find the best sources of information for their particular field their particular sector I find that Twitter and Facebook are essential for me to do my job because I've friended and I follow on Twitter those people who really seem to have a sense of what's the most exciting thing happening I also read the general press from the New York Times the Wall Street Journal, the Economist because they tend to filter out the stuff that's really going to have an impact and they're listening to a lot of the same people I'm listening to but that's the challenge how do you filter it all out how do you avoid spending four or five hours a day just reading blogs and websites you have to in the end count on your friends to point out the best material the best sources of information on where technology is going so my final question would be about your predictions that you've made at the end of the session can you elaborate on that? well I made two outrageous predictions the first one was that in five years 80% of all the world's computing all the storage all the computing and all the software is going to be done in the cloud that's an outrageous prediction which is perfectly possible and unlikely I think it will probably take ten years it will probably be 2020 but at that point more than four fifths of all the world's computing will not be happening on my laptop or in the mainframe in my company it will be happening on someone else's data center that's a technical change just a tectonic shift in how we do computing the other big prediction was that we're going to have 100 billion different things connected to the net each of us will have 50 or 100 different devices appliances sensors in our life that somehow interact with the net and I said five years because that's possible this is cheap technology we haven't figured out a way to put it all together and integrate it into one system and make it really useful so it will take ten years probably to do that that's how I protect myself in ten years I can go back and say well see but the other prediction was about the cloud and this is where I'm really focused right now I'm very concerned that if we don't create the right environment the cloud will not live up to its full potential we'll end up with different separate clouds that don't work together they don't interoperate or even connect to each other different companies will do different things and will miss the opportunity to really combine all the best of the best into customized applications with the internet we built a network of networks everyone used the same technology and they all had incentives to tie it all together if customers and particularly governments demand that the cloud services they buy are based on common standards and that this cloud service provider will interoperate with that cloud service provider then we can build a cloud of clouds and the whole thing will fit together and I can take data from one place on the cloud combine it with software elsewhere store it on a third piece of the cloud and it will all work seamlessly but that requires that companies work together that they we call it co-optition competing while they co-operate and that's my dream that's my vision for the cloud of clouds and I'm doing all that I can