 Okay. Good evening everybody. I'm very happy to welcome you to this seminar. I'm very excited about today, the discussion and the speaker for today's seminar. Here's what I want to do before we get started. In a minute, I will give the floor to Yannick, and I believe that she will present Governing Digital Society and explain why it's not only a research group at Utrecht University, but the research group, and we'll present our activities. And then I will introduce DASA, and we'll tell you a little bit more about how we're going to structure today's seminar, and then the floor will be yours, DASA. So without further ado, I will give you the floor, Yannick, for again explaining our group and how we govern digital societies. Yes, thanks very much, Thibaut, and a warm welcome to DASA Greenwood and to all of you. Indeed, my name is Yannick Kerach, so I'm a professor of fundamental rights law at Utrecht University. And together with a number of other people amongst whom is also Josef van der Kuys, also present here today. We formed the board of this wonderful research focus area governing the digital society. Of course, I'm not going to steal too much of your time because I know these kinds of opening words are always a little bit boring. But I just would like to highlight and to give a little bit of context to today's, well, short webinar and lecture, digital lecture kind of thing. And indeed, well, the context is that we do have this focus area at Utrecht University. And in fact, I always think it's a rather posh term for just something extremely important, such as bringing researchers together who work at different faculties who work in different fields, but they are still all interested in doing research on similar shared topics and fields of interest. And, well, obviously, the main topic that brings us together is this idea of governing our digital societies. And I think, well, the incidence has just shown that there is great benefits to all these digital means, but also considerable risks and problems involved. And it's the great challenge of our time to deal with those, to make the most of the benefits and to somehow mitigate and reduce the risks that are involved. And, well, whether we are data scientists or lawyers or economists or media scholars or governance scholars, we're all aware of this enormous impact. And I think together we could really get further in trying to find possible solutions for all those issues. And that's why I really like this idea that we only recently, I think we're working on this since a few months in this new setting of this focus area. But we've already achieved considerable collaboration, which I really like. It's very fruitful. So it has brought us a lot of energy, new ideas, and also it has resulted in some funding and that has in turn enabled us to institute some special interest groups. And we currently have six of them, and they all deal with very particular topics within this overall theme of governing the digital society. So one concentrating on the platform society with one focusing on principles by design. We have another on inclusion in the data fight city. And the fourth one concerns platformization of education. There is one on digital migration, and of course, and most importantly for today, the both special interest groups works on the topic of blockchain for society. And even if those groups have only been in existence for just a few months, and we know it's not the easiest time for doing research. And they are very active already. So they are very much involved in doing collaborative research. They've started building teaching programs. And they are organizing extremely interesting events. And I think today's webinar is a very good example of that. So if you want to know more about this, if you feel inspired by today's session, I certainly could recommend paying a visit to our website. You can easily find that by using yet another digital means just Google governing the digital society and Detroit University and be sure to find it. And I hope we could also welcome you to future events that are going to be organized by this focus area or by one of the special interest groups. So, well, that's just this little bit of background information. And I think, well, we should now just quickly turn to the to the real event for today, which is I think what we all have been waiting for. So people, can I just hand back to you to do the proper introductions. Or thank you very much enough to say as a researcher it's indeed very exciting to be working with all the all the different schools within your track university so it was a personal note but but we have such a good time. And indeed the special group I'm leading for governing digital society is focusing on blockchain. And today I believe that does I will be touching just probably a little bit on blockchain but not necessarily. And the way I see the technology and I believe that does as the shares the same views that blockchain is actually about the infrastructure, which is one of those potential infrastructure for for the new world. It's not the only one, but it's interesting I think to think about it in terms of infrastructure on top of which you could build something. So, now let me tell you a little bit about about Daza and hopefully I will succeed in in making him uncomfortable right now, because I have a lot to say. So does I is the research scientist at the MIT media lab, where is studying human human dynamics. So this is something that I found somewhere on the MIT website and that I liked very much so I thought I will use it. And indeed again it relates to the topic of today's talk infrastructure so that human human beings can actually behave and interact in a certain way. Daza is also the founder of civics.com which is a boutique provider for professional consultancy services for legal technologies. And I have to say that, and this is probably where I hope that I will blush a little bit that does I is also a great mentor to many of us in the in the legal tech communities. I know, including for legal hackers, but not only. And I believe that is work is bringing the gap between the law and computer science, among others. And so in sort in short when I was presenting today's presentation I thought well does is actually us in 20 years right this is hopefully what we can achieve in 20 years to bridge the gap between those two words, which are two constraints on our societies. Very recently is he has been creating the MIT computational law reports that you can find at law dot MIT dot EU. And so once again I'm thrilled I can all wait for your presentation does the way we're going to proceed is that you will first hear from him for, I guess, about 20 to 30 minutes. Then I will be doing a fireside chat with with does that for about 10 to 15 minutes, and then we'll open the floor to to all of you for for subsequent questions. So, without further ado does that. Thank you very much for being with us today and the floor is yours. Thank you so much for that generous. Introduction, and I, I just want to say what an honor it is to be with you to bow who's been a terrific collaborator has told me so much about this group and I'm excited to make your acquaintance and I hope that after today will find opportunities to collaborate or at least keep communicating. So at MIT, I'm going to put on my, my branding now. This is my MIT hat so I'm speaking my capacity as a academic researcher at MIT today. And the URL is law dot MIT dot edu. It sounds a little like you said law dot MIT dot EU. And that's certainly something that's in the realm of possibility in the future we should, we should talk about a collaboration, maybe a an outpost of MIT. But this one is edu. And there you can find the computational law research program and, and especially this new publication we have called the MIT computational law report. Where we're beginning to provide some platform for people to socialize ideas and new research on how the law can be engineered to be expressed as as as basically applications online, fed by data. And today, I would like to talk about a of a particular idea. I'll do a little screen share. Can you see the screen. Great. This particular idea is as T bow foreshadowed is identifying something that that that some of us think is missing. Right now, during what after all is still in a sense, relatively early in a transition phase from the industrial age to, you know what many call the information age. And that is infrastructure public infrastructure, and in the information age that would be very much digital infrastructure. So, why do we think this is missing. Well, if you take a look back on borrowing from Europe and environments now but you know public infrastructure has been absolutely essential in traditional civilizations, you know, the aqueducts public spaces like coliseums systems of roads that have transformed society and the economy and in a sense upon which civilizations have been founded to basically providing that that undergirding that that allows people to communicate and to transact and to relate at large scale without individual permissions. So, this is a fun little map that that I've enjoyed and it basically just expresses the system of Roman roads at the height of the empire as a subway map. And what this is meant to convey. I just think it's a cool image but but what would it mean to translate and refactor and apply this idea of truly public infrastructure into it into a modern age that is the next generation digital age. So there's some precursors. I think GPS is a very good example of a service that, well it started quite constrained and for military and official use but now it's generally available and you know there's different flavors around the world but it is made possible a great many things in navigation and in commerce and and in society and for individuals. Is a service, the way that we know what time it is and can coordinate our servers and can begin to do more fine grained and coordinated scheduling of events and tasks and activities is expressed as a service, including through apis application programming interfaces. It's a little bit more niche here but in the US we have the so called do not call list, and also mobile number portability. These are these operate the do not call list through a registry system and it's regulated. And it allows anybody to identify themselves and their number or telephone numbers to go on to a registry that has some requirements, including that that they not be, you know, have unsolicited commercial calls. This is a kind of these are sort of examples of of broad public systems that are, you know, these are very much digital systems. But they don't, they're not the same yet as these kinds of systems. It seems like there are some things that are missing. So what might truly public infrastructure look like. Well, here's just a few ideas just to start a conversation. One thing that seems to be missing is is a concept of like a log or ledger and I think that's a one way to to implement such a thing is certainly through blockchain or distributed ledgers. So it's hardly the only way in fact that's still relatively new technology not yet really proven, especially at large scale. And for the reliability that infrastructure would need but but you can nonetheless imagine any number of ways using, you know, hash technologies and and apis where you could provide for example a public digital time stamp service on ledger that was available so that when an event happened of any type but you could get a basically enter it into the into a public log. You know that things like this could make available receipts public notice, for example, or RFPs, lots of things are right now you would see through particular government proceedings, you know, could be available. Not just for those few official acts and stratified and, you know, siloed across jurisdictions, you know local and national, but actually for for anybody to use public laws one where I really think Europe is much further along than the US and most other countries in other regions, but you know being able to have law in a sense as a service so that it would be possible using standards to you know search filter sort and even integrate legal rules that apply across any jurisdiction and be able to have a sense of history for inversion of what rules applied at a given time and what rules are going to be an effective date in the future that you know these things are not too hard to do on systems like you know get hub for example, or or other register API based systems but we, we actually don't have access to law right now in a usable digital format it's still a paper paradigm. But these rules very much govern our systems, many of them do and they can be expressed increasingly as code that can be discovered and ingested for systems that need to comply with that code or or may want to leverage it. Identity is maybe the most interesting one, and it's one where I'm going to patient to say public identity. There's serious privacy questions but we already have digital identity, it just doesn't work very well. You know, in the paper age, you know, birth certificates marriage licenses, death certificates voter registration public licenses for lawyers and doctors. These are all examples where as a society we've already made a decision that you know for good policy reasons. And just these facets of identity to be publicly available. Again that there's not a service for this like there's no easy way to identify oneself or to authenticate the identity of another for some of these public purposes. Same goes very much for businesses. Google has been filled a lot of this void, you know, the, you can see, you know, coffee shops and businesses that have that appear on Google maps with some metadata and other information about them there's a whole system that is provided through postcards and US may and and mail for businesses to claim their identity and to prove that they're the business at that address and therefore have like edit rights over like their store hours and things like that. But wouldn't what one might think that the authoritative source of the identity of a business, for example, would be the government that incorporated that business. And would say whether it's still in good standing or exists and who the authorized representatives of that business are. So if you look at just some of the issues like phishing attacks and, you know, or just being able to find a business and know that you're speaking to them. This could all be addressed very easily if only the identity of the business were available in a standard way. This could be an example of a public infrastructural service upon which so many types of interactions and transactions could be founded. It's not like, you know, we put the roads out, but we don't say exactly what you need to do on the road or where you can go or for what purpose you can write on the road you can do it for any purpose that's an, that's an indicia of infrastructure. You build, you know, architectures and specific uses on on infrastructure and then infrastructure has to be reliable and available to enable that. And then I'll just throw out the idea of a public square, you know, a kind of a place where people can assemble, can discuss, perform, protest, celebrate, you know, if you think of the triumphs or the, or the public squares in physical and the forums in physical cities and environments, there's not really an equivalent in cyberspace now we have these sort of very weird private spaces like Facebook and and others but but where's the public square. It wouldn't be that hard to have a infrastructure type service that allowed for some threaded discussion, some media sharing a profile page, that type of thing. And what could that make available. What could that make available. So these aren't necessarily other than identity I don't know that any one of these is, is a you know is is of a type that's you know ready to go out and you know be built but this is more, these are examples of something that's missing. In order to successfully transition civilization itself to the digital age. Some other more tangential things that have come up in meetings in a research group at MIT is dispute resolution as a service. Public education, you know, being able to identify your credentials and skills and put job postings out. So again this isn't for a particular company it's more of a service type to allow people to match in a reliable standard way. You know some of the sorts of things you could do on that. Public log or ledger service could be individuals could post an RFP say you know I'm looking to buy a house and you like one or two bedroom house you know, you know within three miles of a school or something and that could actually flip the market right because it's very much a sellers market and people have these brokers going around trying to find people I might want to buy the house. If there is a way that people could express their intent and demand through a ledger at the consumer level not just a big business with an RFP or a big government that could transform and the very essence of markets themselves. Transport hailing is another interesting one so right if you want to hail a taxi now you. Most of them don't have apps in the United States, you have to call a telephone number or stick your hand out. And if you want to use an app now you're in a walled garden like for Lyft or Uber. This could be a public service that this might be the type that could be a subservice or an application built upon a public ledger, for example. So these are some some thoughts on on something that I believe is missing, which is the notion of public infrastructure. And I guess I'll just end on a note of describe that connects it hopefully back to governance, which is when I was a young lawyer in the mid 90s I worked for a state government the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a technology council. And one of the things we did was we realized that we needed sustained multi year investment in our networks and information technology of a type that we couldn't really successfully manage in year to year budgeting, the way government typically works. And we believe that some of this was in fact, best understood as infrastructure as like a capital project, you know not so different from roads and bridges, or a report. And we put together a bond, you know, as a financing vehicle and we got, I think in our case it was Moody's was the bond rating agency that we worked with and there was some convincing to do because no one had ever heard of an information technology bond before. But we convinced them that it was of the right type and there was some back and forth, you know, getting like you know desktops and, you know mouse and keyboards was not considered infrastructure but some of the deep network and laying the pipe, you know across the state for bandwidth and some of the other elements of the, of the it was considered infrastructural, and we got those bonds and we're able to actually build out some of this service and they continue to do it bonds these are examples for public sector of capital project type bonded infrastructure, but what about for society itself, like we know how to build infrastructure that enables everybody to use it public infrastructure. Where is it and what might it be in cyberspace. So that is the talk that I'd like to engage in. Thank you very much and I'd be delighted to to discuss it. Yes, thanks very much. I mean, I know it's cliche to say it's a lot of food for thought but I think in this case it's a lot to think about. I think I thought it will make sense for me to ask you a few questions, especially since we've been working together. And hopefully I could, I could direct our conversation in a way that will be helpful to everyone in the room and then to open the floor to everyone. So I do have four questions if you want to disregard one of those please just tell me. I guess I will go and start with the end and then eventually go back to the very beginning of your presentation. The first question I add is the one related to identity. And indeed, and especially in the field of blockchain we've heard a lot right about that idea of protecting your identity being able to display only the identity that you want. And something which to me is very interesting is that there are two different objectives which actually are quite opposite. On the one hand, you may want to protect your identity and, you know, to escape, for instance, the power of big companies or big government, and you may want to be able to do something in a way which is private. And on the other end, as you said, sometimes you do want to prove your real life identity right, you may want to be able to do something and to say yes, this is me you can trust that this information is true. And, and I know that the conversion between the two is really hard and especially this is one problem that we see with voting right and using blockchain for voting. How do you use it in a way which is private and then eventually display your real life identity. So I was wondering if you have any thoughts on on what will be needed at the infrastructure level for this type of services or this type of dual aspects will could function in a way which is which is efficient. So, I think that's that question is at last timely, you know, people have talked about digital identity for a long time, and all we've got is usernames and logins and we've seen what happened in the first attempt to just have a zoom call. It was immediately overrun by by, you know, very disruptive, you know, unauthorized users of our network system. It doesn't really work very well, we're getting neither security nor privacy with the patchwork of systems that do kind of authentication right now and really what's needed, I would say is a way to push it down from every individual architecture of every system down to something that's more of a core service, maybe an infrastructure type service that can support certain common interactions for identity that can be consumed by lots of other applications and services, and that we can maybe more invest and amortize higher security, because now it's being leveraged a lot and so having some inconvenience for two or three factor authentication across a lot of systems may make a lot more sense and getting government involved in some ways is not necessarily bad. There's some suspicion or presumption that government is not a great go to in the United States, but people like to have government for voting roles and for driver's licenses. The idea of being able to leverage state or local governments as a place you could go to reclaim your identity if it were compromised just as we do today is one example of a way that these things could connect. Let me show you something that I think is potentially promising as an example. Here we go. Can you see my screen. Yes, we can. So here's something called my Colorado digital ID. This is my Colorado you know is is a portal for the state government of Colorado, but one of the things they've implemented is something called my Colorado digital ID, which is basically an electronic verifiable representation of their state issue driver's license. And at least in the United States driver's licenses have become the very key what we call breeder document or like a key core credential of identity, and there hasn't really been a way to represent that digitally up to now. This is one way, and you kind of you know that the state can. If you download the app and you already have a driver's license that's been issued based on the enrollment and the, the issuance procedures that they have you can basically represent that in a wall in a digital wallet on on a phone. And you can connect it with by taking another photo and doing a few other things, photo of yourself and a photo of the license, and, you know, and, and getting an SMS or a telephone or an email to, you know, basically link that to to you. They feel that that's sufficient to be a valid driver's license that you could show her the police if you're pulled over or something like that. In theory, you should be able to show it as identity in a hotel, if when you're checking in or anything like that. So this is I'd say is an example of of like a of like a direct linear step of taking the existing identity infrastructure and just expressing it digitally. Another step that may be needed would be something that could that could extract that could encapsulate it even further. So something that could maybe operate across different jurisdictions and or maybe even in the private sector like your employee, something that sources from you as opposed to is issued to you from a given particular government. Some people have used the phrase self sovereign identity for that. And there are blockchain distributed IDs as one way to potentially implement this idea. I think it's still early days there. But this is a service type that I think is the right, you know, general category of how to address ID and I think you know starting small and conservatively is the right way. Probably things like voting ought to be the last thing that that's done, but we can do some things iteratively and incorrect as needed to get there. I guess the final thing I'd say is take a look at what Wyoming select committee on blockchain and I think it's like digital innovations doing we have a here they have a hearing this coming Monday or Tuesday. And I've been helping them with digital identity legislation that creates some core definitions of this idea of an individual that has identity, you know, by which we consent to be governed or by which we can choose to sign a contract and that these sorts of all of which is increasingly happening online, as well as business identity so we're creating some sort of legal primitives or legal like core definitions that they're then picking up in other parts of the statutes, as they keep up with the digital transformation. Yes, and I mean indeed we see also the business implication right if you are able to log in into a social network not using your account on that social network but the identity provided by the state potentially you could cut access anytime, which means that in term of data evaluation, it could change the game so that's, I think that's a fascinating issue. And of course it brings me to my to my second question which is, well, yes but what about and that's the issue we stumble upon when working together right what about government using that power to then abuse that power. I mean, you know, we thought that in the United States it will be impossible. If I ask you the question five years ago you probably would have said well, I mean common that's the United States. And potentially today your answer will be a bit different right, especially in 10 days depending on the results of the election. So what what will be needed you think at the infrastructure level once again to prevent abuses from public power once they have all that information and once they control the infrastructure. Indeed, so you frame the question as identity that sources from the government. And I'm, I'd like to distinguish that assumption a little bit from another possible way forward, which is identity that sources let's just say conceptually from the people, or from each person. And so, but in the United States part of our political philosophy, you know coming back from john lock and, and Thomas pain and others is that, you know, we really were rejecting the idea of kings and government as as having some inherent or divine sovereignty, and we believed that the people are the source of sovereignty, and that we would create governments that that that we felt were fit to govern us and we and to be legitimate they need to operate by the consent of the government and we can change them. It's expected that they'll be changed we'll just make our best guess and give it a try and you know, iterate. So the way that we express their identity back then was pretty simple show up at a town hall, and you know you would raise hands you would sign things in paper. How do we translate that to digital system so not change the idea. How do we express the idea digitally, we have biometrics, you know we have things that we know we have factors of authentication. That's part of it that's part of a mechanism, but there's an architectural question of, is there a way that people can express and maintain this, the authoritative source of their identity digitally. There are many ways we can do that. The question is, do we choose to do that and do we have the courage to build and rely upon such systems. Yeah, yeah and I think indeed that's a fascinating distinction. Maybe I will ask you my third and fourth question together. So everyone that I'm sure everyone has lots of questions for you. I was wondering, you mentioned API and I think indeed that's, you know, although it's an old technology it's key and very important. So I was wondering what you would think are, again, what is needed at the infrastructure level for those API to function as they should and in a very efficient manner. And the fourth question was regarding the tools for transforming information into data, because you mentioned a lot of that issue of data. So if you have a few that you like to use or what's the direction. So that will be my, my last questions for you before I open the floor. Certainly. Yeah, so very, thank you those are critical practical questions I would say and so the first thing to note is that there's such a thing as an API. You need them application programming interfaces make possible. Kind of access to data and applications that that can be agnostic to one domain or one silo or one business or one government. You know, they just they're just a programming interface that lets you do it like a request and and and and a reply of data and and we need to do a better job of thinking in terms of API as opposed to a person navigating to a website and doing a search and working and then downloading a PDF. Yes, this is digital home but it's not, but it's still a paper paradigm. So once we can start to take that information and express it as a service through an API, according to your set to the final fourth question standards, some kind of schema, or like a JSON schema for example, you can note what the structure of the data will be can be published so that anybody can program an application or a service to interoperate with these APIs. So one example that I really like is on structured data is the Securities and Exchange Commission SEC in the US that governs publicly traded companies. The quarterly filings of their finances and material contracts and other disclosures they have to make. Those can all be submitted in their companies and encourage to submit them an XBRL format, Extensible Business Reporting Language, it's just a structured data format that lets that that's sort of how you express all of the disclosures they have to make. This is good and that's a government agency that has a regulation that identifies what the schema will be in the taxonomies in a place that anybody can find. So it's like government knows how to say this is the API, and this is how you can comply with the law, use this API to do your filings. It's really well when the data is available, marked up with XBRL. Oh my it is so good. Like we have discovered so much check out the next release of the MIT computational law report for some terrific applications and data science that Professor Dan Katz and his team have done on securities and exchange filings that that are expressed as data. We can do that in other areas of life as well and other parts of government. It's a design pattern. We simply need to do it. All right, well thank you very much. And of course, I guess one of the issue will be how do you translate democracy and human rights into into data right eventually it will be asking us some very important question I believe. So now we'll open the floor to the audience. So I guess the easiest way. I do not see any question in the chat. If you do have a question just unmute yourself and ask your question. And otherwise have lots of questions, but I'm sure you do as well. I see one question. Can you maybe I will. Yeah, do you want to read it out loud maybe. Okay. What could condition, what could be conditions for interoperability between infrastructural systems that are currently owned and operated by a variety of private companies, which could turn them into reliable and efficient public infrastructures. For instance, the condition that individuals can control their own identity attributes and personal data. Well, the way is it the person who asked the question I think you kind of answered it in the beginning like one condition for identity I think would be that the best one I can think of is to situate the authoritative source of identity with the people themselves, and to structure accordingly, but there are practical conditions as well. So one thing is, I do think government is very critical for public infrastructure like all of the stuff I showed you from Rome and all the, the public infrastructure I've ever been involved with, you know, as government is either a role or a very important public private partner in in the financing and the building and the deployment and the management and the governance and responsibility for that infrastructure setting the rules, making decisions. So, you know, one thing, one type of condition that could be helpful would be legislation that creates like a quasi public entity, or, or that designates government authorities, and gives them authority to float bonds and to, and to identify the governance and, and what the rules of the road would be in the public infrastructure. So I think that would be a very important precondition to the build out of public infrastructure, not, I guess one way to look at the question is, what are the conditions for the build out of public infrastructure in physical space. And a lot of those are going to apply in cyberspace. Anybody else. So, maybe while you think about your question, I will ask you another one. It seems to me, and I know this is certainly true in the US. Actually, the Netherlands is one of the few exception all over Europe, but it seems that there is a trust issue in our institutions, right. There is a trust issue between individuals, but also in our relationship with the states and the government. So my question is, is, is now the right time for implementing this kind of infrastructures, especially public ones. And I guess I could ask the question to be differently. What do you think will be the impact, if we manage to implement some of those infrastructure, what will be the impacts on our relationship with the states and our trust level with the states. How do you envision all that. So, now is not the time. Now is, it's not too early to begin discussing this and thinking about it, talking about it, debating in a serious way, what would be the first one or two or three public digital infrastructures that would be most needed, most achievable, you know, highest value, most ready, best fit, you know, and so forth, most realistic for sure. And I would imagine, you know, if things unroll well, maybe as early as three to five years could be, you know, good timing to begin building some of these things out, provisionally and seeing how they go. You know, infrastructure is a decades kind of, you know, game, it's not a, you know, weeks and months or even few years kind of thing. And that's completely appropriate to make it so simple. What, how could such things change the relationship of people to the state. So, my basic sense and this is a little conservative, I'll admit is, I think a good starting point is no change. Like, how about we just achieve a successful transition of the existing systems to a digital age, just without leaving our values or capabilities out like maintaining them intact, but now they're occurring legitimately digitally, which they are not now. The first of it is missing. You know, and then we can begin to, you know, think, you know, update, like it or not the social compact and the political compact is always evolving. And it will continue to evolve. And I think there'll be dynamics that I'm not sure I can guess that will be different as a result of these things occurring in digital environments. But I'd say the real priority now is to successfully transition. And I guess one thing that could be different is, you know, things may happen faster in some ways. You know, and, you know, perhaps having some bulwarks or some like artificial like time periods for change as part of change management and governance may be appropriate for certain political situations to manage those. Yes. And, and I mean, to me it's always, it's always interesting. I remember going back to the New York Times and the Washington Post archive and to enter the keyword cyberspace or internet back at the beginning of the 90s to see what they were thinking about it. So of course, part of the press was saying, well, the internet is for pedophiles and terrorists and that's it. And the other part was saying, well, it might change something. What they saw the time is that it will change the speed at which we exchange information. But, but almost no one saw that it will change also the nature of information, right. Eventually, if the infrastructure we've been describing will change not information, but transactions and the, and the way we interact with one another. It will also change the nature of that. And of course, it's really hard to see right to some degree. But I see we have another question in the chat. Do you believe that it will be possible to create the transnational cyberspace public infrastructure. And if not, how can we prevent. Yes, that's a very timely question. How can we prevent dividing dividing the cyberspace into smaller parts governed by different governments. So if you just take identity as an example. One can imagine like core identity services that allow you just to identify who you are. When you want to not necessarily to have it used without consent for mass surveillance, but when you want to identify yourself like to log into an application for example, or to sign a contract. And these types of things as opposed to being put into a pen of a given application like we chat or Facebook or docusign. This is an example of something that you know through treaties and through international conventions like you know, like maritime law. I think, you know, can be designed and implemented in a way that is global and trans transnational by design. And then you know different countries will appropriately have different rules of the road about like well how does we chat operate and how does Facebook operate. This is an higher level of architecture that can be built on underlying infrastructure. The question is what are the core infrastructural services that people need as we are alive in the digital world. And it brings me actually make me think about another question which is, what should we do as academics, where should we start. And I guess, potentially the first thing that comes to my mind is that probably we should share knowledge and explain which type of infrastructure. And actually we know that the Chinese government is putting lots of money into creating a new infrastructure right for the web. But do we want to use it, do we trust it. Well, I'm not saying that the answer is negative or positive but at least I can say the answer is negative. No, we do not. Yes. Well, it seems to be negative, but it's very important for not only us but for everyone to understand why the answer is negative. And that would be very complex right to some degree and I know we've been discussing the, the Facebook documentary, the social dilemma, saying well on the one hand it's great because it puts some very interesting questions to the public. On the other hand, maybe you do not need to be so biased and to disregard part of the story. So, what do you think is our role as academics, how can we approach those issues. Yeah, the best way to, well I think some of it is philosophy, logic, research, debate, allowing marketplace of ideas. But you know another perfectly good role of academia is research. MIT is a research institution. We're always building things. We're prototyping things. We're putting ideas in action into the world. I'd say a really good thing to do, especially using open source that makes it possible to quickly propagate and test ideas is to build things and that reflect ideas of how things could and maybe should be. And to get as many of those out as possible and to build partnerships and to allow laboratories of innovation and democracy to blossom. All right. Well, it sounds like a plan. Do we have any, any further question. I think otherwise, it's about time and I know you are a busy man. So, let me just wait for five more seconds. Thank you very much. And it's terrific to make the acquaintance of your team and I hope that we can maintain the connection. Well, I hope as well. Any, anyone just in mute yourself, but I guess it's about time. No. All right. Well, again, lots of questions, but I guess the conversation is to be continued. So, on behalf of everyone, thank you very much for joining us. I hope indeed we could collaborate and build right. A great article has been published recently, saying that it's time to build. And I think this is very much true and I know you agree with that. So, again, thank you very much for joining us. And I wish you a great day. What time is it for you? 1pm, right? 1pm. All right. For us, it is 6pm. So it's time for dinner, as you know, in the Netherlands. Bon appetit. Thank you very much. And have a good day and I'll see you soon. Bye bye.