 You know, it's a it's a crooked path from today into the future and it's not really clear what that path looks like But of course, we have some hopes and some dreams I think just as all of us did when we started an open source and so today I want to talk a little bit about Thinking about the future both from the internet and the web and free software So in the future It's clear Floss is everywhere Floss is everywhere today and this is really quite remarkable. You know in the early days of Mozilla floss was sort of radical and really sort of Everyone who wasn't involved in it knew that floss was some odd thing that maybe developers did but that really wouldn't have impact And it would always be small and sort of Developery like and in the United States we were called socialist and un-American and such things So floss everywhere today seems maybe obvious when you think about it, but certainly was not at the time And so I think a few things have gone into that one, you know, the right idea at the right time to a deep need for real collaborative work and Development and three the early very early work of license plus community is also been a model and so not only is floss everywhere today, but The open part of it is everywhere from open source and open standards where we started to open data open government Open science citizen science and so some of these core ideas from floss through the work of These groups us actually has become much more mainstream and has moved even out of floss Not always in the free software moniker, but certainly in the open moniker and that's a really exceptional piece to have accomplished in 20 years or so and sometimes there's a You know the cost of success so today me github is obvious It doesn't necessarily carry all the values of the thoughts of the things that go into floss software for some It does for some it doesn't it's just the way of working and so there are many things about floss that are mainstream today which is wild success and also means That there's still more to do because You know while floss is everywhere closed systems are everywhere too and so floss software floss libraries floss developers and communities Have gotten much stronger But in the internet today a really encased and wrapped in and often developed to the general consumer Inside a deeply closed system and so we can see do you think about the online life? Not so much of developing but of actually engaging with activities and the human experience Despite the layers of floss. It's really a small number of closed systems and so On its own sort of without interest without us without the other activists for freedom and openness and choice You can imagine that these closed systems the human experience on the internet for most consumers will continue for quite a while Sooner or later, they may decay or some new technology or new business model might come along But that's not apparent in you know the next few years and so the questions of floss and what we can do Does our work in our projects here affect the internet affect the experience and if so Might we tune our work or our thinking to have more impact? And so of course, that's the intersection that Mozilla lives in Born out of floss communities standing on the shoulders of giants but also very focused on the internet and so the use of Floss software and user control and choice and safe and secure software in our case really aimed at online life Both the structure of the network itself and the human experience and so for this question of you know the future of the internet I want to frame it today in three questions and three responses So the first one How do the values that build floss or build free software and open source communities? How can they get built or expanded and modified and really built into the fabric of the internet more? We see them in the development methodology of much of the software in the internet But we don't see nearly as much in the human experience and so one question is what might that look like? What might we do? What are we doing today? If there are many of us thinking about these questions? How do we join together and become more effective? You know a second question Will the future be webby? You know for those of us certainly have a certain vintage We came online to the web or the worldwide web and the internet underlay it but the graphical user face and the ability to Navigate and to move easily outside a command line was the web and there are certain things about the web that made it powerful and That reflected many of the aspirations of floss software now today Many people don't know much of the web and certainly if you come online For the first time on a phone and in many of the environments in the world You may not actually know about the web actually mostly what many people know about is Facebook So so the distinguishing Differences between Facebook and the internet are unclear But then when you try to get to the web or what do we mean about the web or the link or hypertext? That's another stage all together and so I'm not a believer It's the responsibility of those billions of people to understand what the web is and why it's different I'm a believer that as technologists and Projects people interested in this part of the world. It's really ours to make it clear What is great when it's great about the web what's great about the internet and where freedom lives? Like you can have protocols that have more or less freedom and openness built into them You can have technology That's the same way and you can have apps and human experience that provide a better foundation for more freedoms for more people And so this question of will it be webby is not a question of whether people will talk about the web but is a question of how much freedom is actually built in there and So we use the link or I do you know as as one very clear example of what that means I I See many Technologists cringe when I when I say this but but I view the link as a distributed Simple mass market data structure where any human being can take the knowledge the wealth of knowledge available online at least in a webby format online and we can make our own Narratives through that and we can make a path through different kinds of data different formats from text to video to voice To AR VR in the future without having a to go to someone and ask permission without having to learn the underlying technologies and so The web was linkable in a two-way fashion You know if the information was out there on a server connected to the right protocols You could get to it and from there you can get out of it back into someplace else And so it wasn't systematized into these closed lock systems So the web is linkable the web is interoperable and the web is set up in a way that there's a piece of software Out there that represents you Not the website Not the publisher that's got content not who ever owns the server, but you and that's the browser and That's why we build the browser. I mean we love the browser Mozilla, you know and we love Firefox. We love the browser me too, but but We love it at its heart because it is the tool that can represent each one of us and and this Arcane piece of software can can represent me vis-a-vis a website Anything from as simple as I want all the text bigger on every website I go to to I don't want to see your ads and your trackers can't follow me and So this question of who represents you or who represents me in an online experience is an open question When we get outside of the old worldwide web and the browser and so sometimes people ask Mozilla Well, why are you so interested in the browser and that's the reason Because that's our model to date of how we represent you and how we might build a stronger and more powerful place for you to exercise freedoms in your online experience and Yes, moving outside of the desktop browser into the other areas or the modes that we use is important to us And but the browser continues to be important. I mean it's very cool And it's it's amazingly complex technology and we understand it But the other root of why we continue to be deeply focused on it is it is the model It's no longer the universal client that it used to be but it is the model for how we take freedom and openness And start to put them in the hands of consumers in some much more easy to use fashion So question to still quite open And you know in the 1990s when we went through this The first time there was a set of activity that turned out to be illegal Tying the operating system into the browser locking out competition sets of rules So that was nice and The EU was a leader in this and this was true in the US as well So That's not the case today You know today all of the things that were illegal because they were bad for competition bad for choice allowed We'll say monopoly or near Malat not monopoly controls stifled innovation today. They're all legal But Apple started the system Apple had very small market share but now Google does this Microsoft does it again, you know the edge browser will reset your default browser Almost every time it updates. So it seems so there's there's a range of activities that were clearly wrong in the first go around with the web and today Whether they're wrong or not is one thing, but they're not illegal as they were and so that means there there is a lot of work to do and The interest in the closed systems is much more now in the closed system level. There's growing concern about Especially in Europe, you know Google Apple Facebook George Soros, you know this week made the connection between the size and scope of these closed platforms and the loss of innovation and business Opportunity, so I think awareness is continuing But we're back in a setting where the things that we knew were demonstrably bad for all of us in society Are all quite legal and they're the norm once again So lots of work to keep keep on there And the third question, how do we tackle the new experiences that are clear about the internet today? We have Known for a long time that surveillance is a problem So I don't think of that as a new one It's an issue that continues and maybe gets worse now that we have sort of commercial Advertising based surveillance that we participate in but there's a whole new set of issues that have become very clear in the last few years It turns out Just having all the information of the world at your fingertips Doesn't mean everybody searches knowledge more. It turns out that we're all online Doesn't necessarily bring us closer together that there's a lot of divisiveness, you know it turns out that the differences in communities don't go away and Class and status and gender and ethnic issues show up in in many ways Unmonitored online and so that's a good size set of issues And it's easy to look around and say wow, you know the thing that we really loved the internet the web It's got a lot of problems now and that's certainly true And many of those problems as best I can figure it out come from the fact that the early internet architecture was Designed by people of generally the same perspective Hey, they were all trying to work together. They were trying to make something that was interoperable They were trying to build technology and they were trying to build a community and They were very clear about the social engineering and the nature of community that they were building and they were wildly successful And we have the internet today. It's taken to eating everything But they were not among themselves fighting They were not playing out ethnic racial gender political religious Differences among them in the things that they were doing and so the system that was designed works great And it doesn't yet have mechanisms in it for when all of humanity is involved and all of our Differences show up. There's a fair amount of freedom of activity and not the same kinds of I would say community based Accountability mechanisms and so you see people free feeling quite free, you know to to say and do really horrendous things so How to start with a happy talk? Okay, so three questions and so One of the things that we're trying to do at Mozilla is to try to answer some of these questions not to have The only answers but to be part of the set of people who are actively trying to engage with this amazing thing the web now the internet that Can connect us in so many ways and needs attention so What what how are we thinking about it? Well? one the starting point you know floss Freedom and openness and collaborative development and what we're increasingly learning about communities and building healthy and increasingly diverse communities there's a range of values that Certainly follows down demonstrates how deep and how far and how wide They appeal to people and how you apply them in different ways and every year There's new projects applying these in places and ideas. You never would have thought of so there's something in the set of values that built this community and We don't quite have a way to express those values in data Because floss software especially the really powerful software sits at the heart of a lot of data systems You name it Amazon Google Facebook, right? But but we don't actually address the questions of openness and freedom in data in a cohesive way And that makes sense, you know, it took a while for the free software definition to be developed It took a while for the entire GNU system to be developed, you know Many many years to develop each of the components that ended up in Linux And so it's not surprising that when we get outside of pure software and we get into other areas that we don't have The consensus or the cohesion about what is open data? How do you protect freedom? How do you protect individuals? So that's an area of real focus And at Mozilla in particular we have wrenched ourselves around into dealing with data Because our approach for many years is we don't want any data Then we never have to think about any data and it allows us to have a whole range of Privacy and security practices and to stay out of a lot of problems because we have no data Well turns out a it's very hard to build a decent product and their recent quantum is so much better as we finally understand it but on a deeper level Our mission to try and make the internet open and accessible to all and a global public Resource and a decent place to live requires dealing with data Data is everywhere now and it's powerful. It's explosive and it's powerful So we're looking into it and hoping to find and connect with others in the floss world who are Interested and or already developing certain principles about data Same thing about cloud services, you know since floss is triggered on distribution the requirements of Copy left don't really apply to the large cloud services. And so we don't have a You know, we don't have our values deep in those systems. So what does that mean? This has been a you know a contentious topic certainly philosophical from RMS from way back So maybe we will always have the same view that if you're not distributing a copy of the code that copy left isn't Acceptable and that therefore cloud services go off on their own But I certainly would like as a community to meet to think about it and look at that pretty carefully and see if that's the full sum of our thinking on those things and Finally the experience which is dated that by this I mean the human experience Which is these closed system pieces? What what can we should we be doing? And so You know, there are many of you that are more involved in some of these areas or have been involved Productively longer than Mozilla house and so I and I think the bunch of Mozilla's who are here are pretty interested in Learning and hearing what your experiences are and I think you will see Mozilla Engage more deeply on these sort of topics as we go forward and they are hard questions data and privacy and security are hard to manage But I feel that the mission requires it and it in some ways it feels pure to say We're never going to have data because then we never make a mistake with data But I think it's so little taking the easy way out And I think the state of the world doesn't allow us to take the easy way out So I also am sure we will make some mistakes with data I wish we could be perfect, but we don't or we won't we're only human So you will see us make some mistakes with data and I ask in that case, you know, let us know call us on it But please Try to be gentle as well It is one thing that drives me crazy in Silicon Valley where people will just feel free to haul in and tell Mozilla Just how terrible we are while they work at Google and are doing these like more Invasive things and then wave their hands and say oh, but you're a nonprofit You're supposed to be better like that frees them to go off and be really nasty people So let's not do that to each other if we can Will the future be webby? I sure hope so Because the ability to have something represent me in the world is really key that needs interoperability It needs competition These are a few of the things that Mozilla is doing here These are the technology side like will the future be webby has a technology side It has a community side and it has a system architecture level side That last piece is hard to crack in the mobile space on tell on phones. I mean Because that's a that's an ecosystem. That's you know, 10 years old and pretty entrenched. We're not done trying but in the meantime and so you can see that the deep voice essentially open-source library for voice You know those those may become system tools But we also, you know continue to explore various technologies that otherwise we think would end up living only in the silos of the proprietary Organizations so we continue to work on this and of course to look around always both when we're here and increasingly in general and see who else is working on that and Can we can Mozilla do the things that we see but can we better be better at supporting the community of people doing others? So I hope you see these projects and find them interesting, but I also hope that We see you and what you're doing and get better at supporting and On the third one this one's really tough because those new issues get you right straight into well who decides Is it doxing? You know, is it really violence? Do you get to talk about x is that censorship? Who decides? What about free speech and so those are really hard problems? And we certainly are big believers in individual action and free speech and yet the internet experience as it is today is not Acceptable so we can't do nothing and so where we are so far. You know Mozilla has a manifesto That's what guides us. That's what we The set of principles that Mozilla is about that we hope anyone who cares about those can relate to and so we have begun adding some Aspirations to them. They're not hardcore principles yet because we don't know how to strike the balance between Human community activity that some behavior is not acceptable and what does accountability look like with free speech and Freedom and individuals being responsible for themselves. Those are very hard So we're not saying this is the way life has to be but we want clearly to set out some Aspirations for the world we're building I do not want to build a web or an internet that is good for government and commercial Stalkers and violence and hatred and divisiveness and not good for individual human beings trying to do decent things So we have a few additional aspirations and I'll just let you read them here and then I'm going to close on that And so those are actually in a public Google group, but probably the URL isn't well known So you will see this start to come out in more easy to find places in the next couple weeks And again, we realize you know individual control and freedom and government censorship are real issues So happy to engage on that, but if you can be gentle, I'd appreciate it And and obviously the hope is that we have floss everywhere as we go forward But in more open systems generally. Thank you You