 I would like to welcome Esther Bison to I&K, and she and I ran into each other at a conference called the Mississippi Ocon in Boston about two months ago, and I button-hold her, and I gave, sing her the praises of annotation, and we had a great conversation, and I reached back out and asked if she might come and share some of her perspective with us, and she said yes, so thank you very much for that. So, I'm not going to go through and read her bio because it's printed on the back of her t-shirts, and there's a better one at Wikipedia, if you actually it's inaccurate. Well, the great thing is that you've edited it. So, but I thought instead of the usual bio, I would just ask a few questions before we've started. So, one of the most interesting things I think about your background is that you used to be the chairperson of I&K, which stands for the International Corporations for Assigned Names and Numbers, of course. So, tell us what I&K does. Well, who knows what I&K does? Just raise your hands. Okay, it seems like everybody does. It was immaculately conceived in 1998 with the mid-boyfrey of the U.S. senior lieutenant governments, and its job was to take over the kind of the regulatory function that was being performed by a latter-day saint called John Postel, who had been kind of going selectly off the reservation and using his powers and I think he took one of the domain name servers offline or something like that. And the second immediate goal was to break the monopoly of network solutions, which had gotten the job around this quite a few years earlier that was just yeah, like a few thousand dominions and it suddenly become a huge business and they were throwing it way too long. So, during that process of creating I&K, which was fraught with obscurity and a lot of angst, all the corners thought it was a U.S. government plot to take over the internet. The business people said it's working fine, they go alone. The techies said we don't need no stinking government regulation. So, there was a lot of mistrust and everything else, but I&K always created, in theory, as a bottom-up, ground-sourced thing. And while that was happening, John Postel had a heart attack and I think had surgery and died shortly. So, basically the ethos of I&K and its board, which should have been John Postel's, turned out to be that of a lawyer culture, who is a really nice guy and I love it, but he had kind of the raw instincts for the internet. Our board meetings were closed, blah, blah, blah. Because we were immaculately conceived, we didn't really have any parents fund us. So, we had a really limited budget and network solutions had a huge budget and kind of like anybody who creates misinformation, they pay a lot of people to pretend to be the public and to create this. So, it was an interesting and complicated birth we did create competition for that, for written stories and written stories and probably the biggest question was should there be more TLDs, top-level domains like .org.com and now you have .com and .net. Now there's even more and there are big controversies over .xxx and there were some people who thought, why not free millions of them, which in theory is fine, we're going to at some point come back to this. Theory is fine, but what they didn't really realize is the shortage of domain names is not of the domain names, it's a space in people's minds and if you have an infinite number of domain names, you might as well just not have any in a sense and that may well happen because people are now searching for Google or apps and the world keeps kind of flexing and creating a new, yeah, when something gets too large or too monopolistic, new things emerge in an orthogonal dimension and that's what you're seeing now and I'm surprised, amortization is one of them. How did you get to become a chair president? Oh, well they were looking for someone who knew something about the internet but wasn't really that involved that they were part of any of these big partisan organizations, the board itself was accelerating people, we were mostly picked again to be innocent outsiders, so I and a guy called General Rye were pretty much the only ones who actually used the internet and I was the only one stupid enough to volunteer to be chairman I thought I would learn something and I certainly did, I learned something today. So the other thing is that you used to be a fact checker, tell us a little bit about that so that that was a wonderful job, it consisted of asking questions and not being satisfied with live answers, I loved it, I could, oh it was for Forbes magazine back when they had fact checking I'd like to say I'm an altar boy, not so much in the church of media but in the religion of truth so it was great, I could learn a huge amount by kind of doing the recursive fact checking I learned, so I didn't really know anything about balance sheets or when I got the job they asked me do you know the difference between a stock and bond and I said no but I'll find out, so I reversed engineering some financial documents Continental Illinois Realty Trust which is I think a huge bankruptcy case and my favorite little discovery from all that reading was that two of the board members got off because they successfully proved they had been asleep at the board meeting during the time the decision was taken I'm going to remain sitting, this is really the goal of this is to be an annotated talk you guys doing the annotation and there are many models of annotation ranging from there's a dead corpus and you comment on it to something much more interactive which is what we're going to do this morning so what I want to do is present three principles and in a sense one conclusion about how annotation should work in the real world as opposed to technically I did a little advanced reading about recent do I own my own blog can people comment on it freely or uncreely and where there's one set right to begin and the other end and first thing you learn whether it's from ICANN or fact checking or anything else there are multiple truths and multiple principles and they don't always entirely align the job of on the one hand regulation on the other the market or effective crowd sourcing is to resolve the interactions of those principles in a way that most people think makes sense so the first is I own my own content yeah I'm a big believer as a journalist a writer and author of one book despite the many people who tell me they read all my books and you know in a sense it's less about the financial more about the the ownership of the integrity this is my book you can comment on it but the the thing itself has an initial identity that I can control de facto once I publish it it's open to commenting legal or you're not it's open open to copying excerpting what have you on the other hand I believe in theory at least I should have the right to at least some of the economic value of that but that's mostly by contract and by copyright law to some extent and I also think in extremists if someone doesn't want people copying or commenting on their stuff they should be able to at least protect it to some extent from not having not having it be commented on in a way that the comments are packaged with the original yeah kind of give it give it some space for separate identity people invidious to the owner so it's something like robot stuff text that's the theory second I'm a big believer in freedom speech you know anybody can comment on anything it's their right and again that's limited by hate speech which itself is a whole nother conference of arguments sort of incitement to violence or other kinds of disruptive behavior whatever but the notion that the government should protect freedom of speech to me is pretty much sacrosanct on the other hand and this is the third principle there's a huge and I think kind of the most important space is these non-government non-monopoly spaces where indeed it's not just the right but almost the obligation of some entity to to manage the content whether it's defining it making it searchable adding value to it restricting the kinds of speech behavior that are allowed those are if you like layers they're separate fabrics there's something else and those will succeed or fail by the number of people who want to use them and if I want to post a blog and have certain favorite people comment on it but not everybody else I should have the right to put up robot stuff text or whatever and decide which either individuals or if you like annotation market owners I don't know what's the yeah no moderation example no it's more like the the entity that kind of owns the fabric or the the layer of commenting you know whether it's genius or some scientific community that comments on chemistry textbooks or a bunch of rabid movie fans or who knows what kind of like Uber has to check the the behavior the identities whatever of its drivers and managed disputes eBay is a huge number of people devoted to trying to eliminate fraud and as a fact checker that was one fact I could never actually get exactly how much money and time they spend on what they call security safety and stuff like that but that's kind of what a moderation platform and that's that's the thing they add creating a culture defining what is appropriate what's not that kind of stuff and I think precisely because there are competing ones and there should be they can they can be as restrictive as they want people are free to leave it's very different from physical space where if an evil government comes in you're stuck in cyberspace you can more or less leave and ideally take your content with you and so that fourth following principle is let the market work let it help define these different moderating entities you know I love I love the idea of different kinds of filters whether it's by who the commenters are whether or not they need to have published IDs what are the rules of engagement what's considered okay speak twice not how much fact checking is there you know you should be free to say anything but I should also be free to completely disregard it if you haven't been fact-checked what what are the rules of this particular commenting platform and then the one that intrigues me the most is people can create new content by creating casts through the comments so suddenly the comments themselves become another piece of content you can define a path through them you can filter all the ones by such and such a person or you can have tight links these are comments that agree with the author these are comments that disagree these are comments you know who knows what but there's a huge amount of stuff you can do with luck you can figure out a business model for it you can enlist your users to do the moderation you can hire people uh maybe you're sponsored by coca-cola and uh yeah that's fine you probably won't find a lot about the dangers of sugar there but that's the rules of that particular platform so that's what I'd love to engage with all of you about annotating what I just said please and Dan's going to come up and be the moderator of this annotation festival so mostly what I'm going to do is just facilitate so Nate and Andrew are going to walk around with microphones and if people have thoughts or questions just to engage in a provocative discussion with us or with your comment parts in the audience we'd love to to hear from you so um is anybody have a question or a comment it seems like the oh yeah Jen Jen Harris yeah thanks the the layers of annotation that you're talking about sort of the way you talked about them is as though they were pre-attached to the content so I come to the content and there's the layer attached to it but in general it seems like it might be any number of pairs of glasses that people might pick up to look at the content okay so um you were using the example robots.txt which I think is a great thing to build on um would you want to pre-attach some layers but allow other ones to be attached where you want to be able to prohibit layers from being attached uh you know layers can be attached to other layers like your second order annotations I mean how does how does that ecology work in this situation in which potentially all sorts of things are competing to grapple with content and show it to you very yeah I think I mean ultimately that ends up being something that the user sorry the content creator can decide and they can rather than going through a whole lot of work they can say I want to post on medium for example where these are the rules so yeah I can always create my own URL if you like using that's totally my own and then I can go to the trouble of creating my own rules but I think in practice people will pick a place that they find comfortable and then you know what they can do maybe there's a more elegant way of doing what we now call cross posting which is they write in one place and they post it somewhere else where there's a different commenting ecosystem around it but ultimately it's and that's why we have all these different competing systems because different people like different rules some people like and let's face it it's not just the rules it's the audiences that come in through the platform that has those rules yeah it gets very meta and complicated and kind of as I said earlier at some point you want to say this is way too complicated let's try something new to simplify it Austin Henderson I wanted to pick up on your reference to dead material and then your creation of this live material and ask if the comment is on something what is your sense of how you control what that that something look if it's changing how does the capacity of the world to change get reflected in the comment that I'm making about it you probably can't totally control that you can sort of say this is a place that seems to be pretty stable but the world will evolve which you know kind of makes it interesting yeah if you go back to the principles you shouldn't be able to unilaterally change the rules but at the same time you want a grammar for changing the rules yeah just like we have the constitution and within the constitution there's a process for amending the constitution and in the privacy world we have a lot of this stuff you own your data except if x happens like for example if this particular database gets bought by somebody else then do you have to give every individual person the right to remove their data or simply to leave it there but anonymize it so there's got to be specs for that as well and you can comment on those specs of course good question yeah good morning my name is Jeremy and you know so it occurs to me that the ethos here is you know pure view that it's kind of moving towards this you know more meta conversation that integrates access from that it's open to any people maybe who filter them out of it's just not worth your time or something like that or they're not contributing towards forwarding whatever the conversation is and I guess where my interest is is in you know what the potential is is that there's a platform where like you can really trust that this thing whatever you could just drop in and then there's there's there's been it's been looked at right and so my curiosity is around how how to achieve this you know in the real world we can move around it here we're talking about different platforms competing and so forth but you know what what is the potential of just merging it all all the participation and to me it occurred that like well that that's what artificial intelligence is just going to crawl everything and then come to its own conclusions but is there a way where actually people you know formulating their own meaning and you know being exposed to each other as like oh this is where you're coming from and then like creating their own synthesis you know it seems to me the potential is to how do we engage with each other so we can make our own synthesis that that's not just done algorithmically apart from our own position yeah um I'm not sure this is the answer but there's there's sort of two things one is the choice of the content owner where to put the content or you know what what platforms to be part of and then there's the choice of the reader or the annotator where to go to see other to see the content and the annotations and then of course the annotations become content themselves yeah the best way to do this maybe just to give it all to an AI that can do all this simultaneously yeah which which you said you include me into that it's really the locality of all this dialogue where and this is what happened in the domain level system where it's you know this conversation is over here and someone's over here and you know if what if they're talking to each other in some sense and and the potential of hypertext is where that's actually what's happening right and everything's linked yeah yeah we yeah we all agree now the question is how to make it interesting and effective and how do people not get lost and that's where you have all the value added that simply because we are too small and too limited in time to I use the word comprehend not just to understand but kind of to absorb everything we try to increase our utility by letting other people do some of the filtering for us or create yeah I want to listen to these people and I don't really want to listen to anyone who's talking in Bulgarian because I can't understand yeah I want scientists not cultists you're suggesting that the author of the page had some sort of directive in that page that to suggest whether or not a reader should be using a annotation tool yes in the sense that I don't want it to touch to my page you can you can talk about it elsewhere but I don't want someone who visits my content to sort of see an outward link to your harassment yeah nasty comments whatever so because in the real world you know when the internet was created everybody was really nice who was on it now that's changed so let me you know that the the dissenting view there would be that uh which the page lands you know um you're screened in your laptop then you you know as the you know person who's running the browser to be able to do whatever you wish with how it's displayed people strip ads and reformat text on pages all the time that people maybe the people who wrote those pages who'd rather not do so um I don't know what he uh well as somebody I mean coming from that world of advertising and stuff as well yeah I don't want people to take my content and use it to sell ads by putting it inside a frame and making a whole bunch of money off my content and there were or yeah I misunderstood reverse that you package ads on your content but when it comes into your browser you deploy javascript to strip it out denying the uh blogger the revenue we deploy lots of these little technologies in the browsers because browsers are so wonderful and let us do them and you know should we have a directive that annotation providers pay attention to and we're an honor to prohibit activity that the user be the browser is deciding to do in terms of participating in the larger community it's an interesting to me the ideal norm is anonymity should be discouraged but allowed and in at the same time anybody can set up their filter at least in theory to ignore anyone who's anonymous like if you don't want to put your name there I don't want to listen to you and then it becomes a job of reporters to trawl anonymous comments to find the truth of being revealed whistleblowers maybe wiki leaks whatever but in the same way I think you want to sort of say annotation should be permitted but in the end ideally the control is left to the individual the individual should kind of like not being anonymous the individual should be willing to be commented on but there may be extreme cases in which they should have the protection of being left alone at least by some people and talking about that and setting it as a norm because the last thing you want to do is end up with a whole bunch of laws that end up being too complicated to understand and always resolved in a way you don't want to resolve hi Tom was maybe I'm missing some of the history here but to me it has always seemed that if I publish it publicly bill the url game mode right it's out there um I can't publish and then say oh you're not going to comment on this um that seems sort of fundamentally against everything that the web stands yes you can comment on it but you can't you shouldn't be able to in an you shouldn't be able to attack yourself to the content you should be able to point to the content that do it from outside um yeah I mean you might not like that and there are people who feel the difference very strongly when they feel they can't publish that being kind of defaced I think part of part of what we you know there are tweets tweets can include a url and so therefore you could build a plug-in just if we imagine kind of a hypothetical example I could build a plug-in that um when I went to a page went to the twitter's api with that url and pulled the streets to mention that and showed up beside our on top of the page and therefore did essentially what the annotation does um and the thing that's different about annotation and that that has created this whole thing that what I think in me as somebody involved in an annotation project should respect is that there is a powerful somehow difference in it um that is you know gets people some some people thankfully not everybody but some people who are at risk um and and some others um gives makes their skin kind of crawl a little bit and it kind of feels like um makes it feel like somebody's stepping on their turf um and I think our you know just speaking from hypothesis our goal is to try to navigate this in a way that that protects the freedom speech um the ability to annotate governments and you know media empires and things like that and but also tries to find a way to to protect uh voices at risk so it's extremely challenging problem we don't have all the answers which is one of the reasons why um I'm so grateful that you're up here helping us talk about it without any answers either uh any few remaining questions um yeah so there's this edge condition if you sort of mentioned that the edge condition I think is for me the story of who I am so let's take as an example um my LinkedIn profile do I have absolute right to say I have a phd from Stanford even if I don't should people have the right to back check that now I think we're in agreement that somewhere else for somebody who can call me out which should I have should everyone have the right to call me out on my LinkedIn profile if people have the right to give me a negative reference and I guess also in terms of your principles should I have a right to allow that because I'll tell you one thing that's happened to me as I've gone from being you know an employee and a manager inside an environment and sales people and clients I had a lot of feedback that said look when you're going a little off the rails here and you're doing this you need to manage yourself whereas now is a more independent agent I kind of do need advice for people to say you don't need to chill here or you know don't ask that question in this meeting so what what's your feeling about that this story of me should there be a place where I get to say who I am whether it's true or not yes there should um but it may be a place that very few people go and I mean at the same time on LinkedIn you live by the rules of LinkedIn because you put your profile up on LinkedIn and they they control the rules of the game I it's an interesting question and it's been a lot of time exploring exactly what they do and what they do about mean comments you know I think LinkedIn is a kind of aspirational place and if I started making mean comments about people they'd probably make mean comments back and then I wouldn't get a job so you have a slightly artificial atmosphere but you know again it's it's your right to tell your story it's other people's rights to comment on it but perhaps not on your own particular limit lot of content but then I don't need to hire you so um one of these goals is to constantly browse and make your Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Opera to build in this annotation function and standard annotation functionality into their user interfaces to to into the Chrome surrounding everything the content of the web and also to get people to use them but um do you know do you know whether there's been any starts engaging the big makers or if there's been like if you what are your intentions regarding if that's not successful what do you see um what do you see people like that obviously is doing likes to do extensions versus such like separate applications and that's really a good question for Dan but in a sense that's what this is all about you know medium is out there but when you start putting it in the browser that's where you want the ability for the I guess I would say you know many talks and many people would get up here and have those kind of discussions today Rob Sanderson's going to talk about the W3C standards process the goal of which was to get this to be something that would becomes web native and ultimately I think um has finds a way into the browser but if we as a community don't work through some of these really challenging issues then um then that's less likely to happen um because it's one thing for me as a user to make the choice electively amongst some other consensual adults to add an extension to the browser because then I'm really am choosing the community but at the point that it becomes built in I still may have to choose my provider my invitation provider at that point but it starts to become closer to the content and more of a permanent thing over the content and less of an elective that that folks are making so you know I certainly think that the benefits of annotation and the cool things that are possible the wonderful opportunities that are open you know why we're all here are things that we should pursue and be great if they become more widespread in browsers but we've got a lot of hard work to do and that goes back to the thing where once you make it a browser standard it becomes a monopoly and therefore needs that constraint because the content owner has very little choice at that point because people are using the standard everywhere so this is actually related to the attention that people have been asking about between the rights of creators versus the rights of you know there's a bounty that allows you to be between a lot of my own work itself versus mentioning a word separately we're talking about separately right and that's parallel in the fuzzy boundary between the content of the web and the browser from surrounding it so regarding where in your personal opinion where do you think one ends in the other beginnings like like you do like for instance in the browser superimposes UI like browsers change all the time they change their UI all the time and people don't consider that part of their work do you think the problem is like people may be worried that comments ramifications be misrepresented as part of the original work or do you think the problem is that a lot of people are seeing stuff like compulsively like stuff that they don't think that they don't want to agree with or where do you think where do you think one begins the other ends as far as browser UI versus content so there's a project that that people in the annotation community site frequently as the kind of the prior art for this argument which is a project called third voice was a company and it was I think somebody else probably knows better than me but about 1998 1999 somewhere in there and it was you know there's a long history of these projects going all the way back to Mark Andreessen's mosaic dot 93 that had for two months had an invitation built in and but third voice you know created a plugin with some sort to get the browser and people went crazy in a bad way but basically they felt like this was graffiti on top of their website and this was you know the kind of origin story for this particular argument and this particular objection people are having and if I recall there was a group a large group of these website owner and blogger folks that got together threatened to file a lawsuit against the company I'm sure you read up on Wikipedia I may not have it exactly right but I think the company folded for other reasons but but this was you know this is I think that is exactly the problem that people have is that they proceeded to be scribbling on their website and your question is to where do you draw that line I think it should be up to the content creator to draw the line for themselves and that's what this is about so so what about government units who defines where we as a as a community get to override well again fundamentally I would say hate speech incitement of violence and you know obscenity as opposed to pornography there's a few of those that are pretty well recognized but beyond that you know again I wanted to be up to the content creator and then whoever wants to create a platform with whatever those things like so and you know if a government should should citizens be able to annotate let's say the Turkish government puts the annotate dot text flag up says sorry don't yeah well then there's my opinions about what governments should do and I mean good it goes back to if I want to be private and anonymous and do nothing that should be okay but if I want to go out and have coercive power have monopoly power over what people see or if you know I can call the police and a rescue then I should be extremely constrained in what I can do or in what we as yeah speaking now as a government but of course not all governments pay attention to my opinions so I think I think this actually gets to the part where you just ended up with the part of my question which is we keep talking about sort of the power to do this the power to do that maybe the governments won't listen to maybe the browser vendors won't listen to us I feel like we're like where does power fit into this like that thing that that is the real question and like the default layer is that a content creator users is going to be determined by the power they have over over the ecosystem and their reach because you don't you don't want to publish them where we're going to see it and you don't want to publish something if the government's going to stop you and so and I think even these additional lenses like even if hypothesis was just a browser extension that was just had really broad reach because I would use it I know for everything you know for example you could imagine Facebook or Google just in every link showing politicians in the searches not in browser that would also be an invitation that would have great reach great power but they have the power to choose whether or not you can do that or not so I think I guess I'm wondering where does power really fit into this and what happens like when you have also maybe have other power platforms like Snapchat where there really isn't an opportunity for an invitation there unless they explicitly decide and I think Snapchat should be able to do that and people can choose whether they like it well there you're not sorry I mean so to your ultimate question where does the power come from one place that comes from is like let's face it it's grandfather in the USG has physical power over us here which it mostly doesn't abuse too badly the Turkish government has a lot more power then the alternative power is a group like this getting much larger and creating a standard that people who create browsers and various kinds of tools observe it's you know that's where it comes from and the discussion here is thinking about how to use that power wisely number one and perhaps how to how to make that power how to increase that power by reaching other people most of them are completely not interested in this whole time and getting them to support this I am Gail Clement I'm a librarian in Hilton and I just wanted to offer a small perspective from you know a profession that looks at this at a more generalized way and I mean we look at author rights in a more holistic way than the idea of freedom of speech so this is what we do all day but for me like I see this moral rights discussion is very generalizable we live in a country that's made a very concrete choice to limit to the tiniest degree possible the moral rights of our creators in this country when we joined the word convention we made a very calculating choice in our society that the rights we give authors is economic not moral and we skate into the edge of what we could do as a country to just get in the door with the rest of the world to have a part of the dimensional copyright convention but Europe and everybody else really respects personhood and gives authors and artists a lot more moral rights so I think we have to start by understanding that this conversation around author rights and moral rights isn't just about invitation it's a very generalized principle and then we can maybe borrow from some of the wisdom and perception of perspectives from the larger square information ethics community in this discussion maybe we can move it forward and see what the answers are the other thing is that there's an awful lot of exploitation that we look at every day from a social justice perspective around respecting other people's rights when it comes to traditional knowledge so it's not just web authors I would argue that people that wrote the Talmud or ancient texts people that have had their wisdom traditions be subject to all different kinds of crazy stuff you know there's a huge social justice component to this discussion that I have to again come from a generalist perspective this is the cost of this and when traditional communities try to shut down access or use or misappropriation of their knowledge traditions they don't find any help because it's kind of hard to it's not actually I just wanted to offer a more generalizable sense that I don't think this discussion is worth it to any human it's very important and relevant but maybe we can draw on wisdom and explorations that are taking place around this dilemma of protecting moral rights in a country that's very capitalist and really only protects economic rights it seems like a good place to end this discussion but to start another one I'd just like to thank you for joining us