 Good evening Hello Hi, everyone. Welcome to the 2015 Berkman Center kickoff My name is Kate Darling. I'm a fellow at the Center and I'm here to introduce our director Jonathan Citrin was not born in Brooklyn, New York He did not publish a memoir in 2010 And he was also not ranked as the 88th greatest artist of all time by Rolling Stone or As the fourth top rapper behind Eminem Nelly and 50 Cent And he did not marry American R&B singer Beyonce in 2008 But he is also known as Jay-Z He actually owns Jay-Z.org and Jay-Z.com does not even exist and For those of you who don't know the other Jay-Z I was talking about you've been in Cambridge for too long But in all honesty if I had to choose tonight between hearing one or the other Jay-Z I would choose this one every time It's true. It's true. He's way cooler. This guy was a sysop on compuserve in the 80s And if you think he looks a little bit too young for that, it's because he was 12 years old at the time He has degrees in cognitive science and artificial intelligence Public administration and law and now he's the George Bemis professor of international law at both Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government He's also a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences And he's the vice dean for library and information resources, which means he basically runs the Harvard Law School library So take that Beyonce He's been a really prominent voice on Internet censorship and control of digital content on privacy digital intermediaries and a bunch of other topics that are really kind of at the Heart of what Berkman does and he also wrote among other things the groundbreaking book the future of the internet and how to stop it Please welcome the co-founder and director of the Berkman Center Jonathan Citrin Thank you very much Kate for that introduction. I I don't think I've ever had an introduction quite like that. That's very exciting Not in that way Yeah, so and not saying they would prefer my ticket prices are significantly lower too So it's really a bargain to come hear me talk And there's food afterwards as well how many Jay-Z concerts have a reception afterwards. So we're really coming out ahead All of them there's a reception after a Jay-Z I see Wow, well who knew Susan Crawford ladies and gentlemen So Welcome. I'm so happy to be here. I love kind of the first day of school. It never gets old It's just sort of repeats and that's very exciting Thank you all for coming to our kind of science fair format next door and for this opener I wanted to give a little bit of what Charlie Ness and our founder would call Ethos logos and then pathos But I think he got it from someone else. I'm not sure where those tools of rhetoric came from But to tell you a little bit about where we came from which now it was a long time ago And the internet maybe was a little bit different then so Back in 1997 We had the idea of starting a center for internet and society at a time when it was dodgy to call something an internet and society center those who were hedging their bets would call them centers on lawn technology just in case this internet thing didn't go anywhere, but we placed a bet on it and Being at Harvard. It's one of those weird things about being at Harvard We started an internet center in the New York Times. It's like that's a story so it's like people start an internet center want to talk about internet and and There we are looking kind of awful Although I will say Charlie looks exactly the same when I believe is wearing the same shirt that he was wearing in the photos so The more things change the more they stay the same and there's Larry Lessig before he ran for president and Makes us look like chopped liver really what have we done lately and there's Cindy Cohn actually who went on to now Become the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so yeah very exciting and This was a day when just like showing up was enough to be like yes news people are studying the internet and it's gotten more complicated since then at the time though One of the things we found ourselves most fascinated by was that the internet Does have a kind of form of collective hallucination to it? It is not a service offered by internet Inc. For which if you are displeased with your internet Experience you can call the CEO of the internet and demand that he or she be replaced or answer to you It looks like Samantha Bates Research associate extraordinary the Berkman Center is surfing now to show the current home page of the internet engineering task force Because my example was from about 1998 as you can see the home page still screams 1994 at you That's an intentional thing to kind of Put you to sleep a little bit. It's like so horrific nothing to see here folks We're just the plumbing of the internet although I do wonder if you chat live with the IETF community What will happen? I Just think I was like Sam is gonna click on it. They could be like we have a live one Oh Do nothing do nothing sorry so the IETF is kind of weird because We found out especially as lawyers. It was interesting to us. It's not incorporated. It has no CEO There's no place for service of process. And in fact if you jump back to my slides, you'll see Let's see. Yep. The Uh Participating the efforts of the IETF. It's not a membership organization. No cards. No do's no secret handshakes Smiley face and I think a missing external parentheses. That's gonna bother me for the rest of this slide But integrity we need to leave it the way it was missed done It's data compression. That's a little lossy though by my lights Anyway, it's a large open international community of network designers here to ensure the smooth operation of the internet It's open to any interested individual. This is a weird way to Design run evolve a network to have people show up And I don't how many people consider themselves though. There are no members IETF members. How many IETFers do we have here? Okay, not enough for a quorum if quorums were needed for a meeting but the kinds of folks that try to reach rough consensus and running code on Protocols for a network that if everybody were more or less to follow them although you don't have to you would end up with bits that can Be routed from any person to any other person and once that happens Anybody can join the internet and it's that open invitation Done without filtering or gatekeeping that has been the cause of so much of the innovation and the cause of course of so many of the problems that have been identified especially by lawyer types of Castle and pathos on the internet and whether or not this model will continue to be the way global networking works I think is very much an open question. We don't assume. This is always the way It's going to be but at the time in 97 98 This was a fascinating and non obvious way to design a global network at a time when compusor was actually still running quite strong so We then found ourselves sort of in the middle of things a little bit when Larry Lessig one of our original triumvirate was summoned by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson from if you ask central casting to send you a judge They would send you TP Jackson He like smoked a pipe and had a shock of white hair and was an incredibly scary man And he was oops. I was about to get a picture of him from Samantha. Yeah, go ahead. Let's let's see TP Jackson Oops, maybe Thomas Penfield Jackson Come on Google. You're letting us down Thomas Stonewall Jack see that's intimidating Yeah, there he is. There he is. That's like that's the usual expression. He had Thomas Penfield Jackson is not impressed and He was the Kayla Macaroni, what's her name? The one who's not impressed Michaela somebody come on Thank you. He's the Michaela Moroni of the internet at the time because he beheld the monopolist at the time Microsoft and Took on this case and actually got quite upset at Microsoft but also thought that the case was really complicated and he didn't feel equipped to deal with it on his own and So he asked Larry Lessig to serve a special master in the case Now normally a special master is somebody Who does the work the judge just doesn't want to do? It's like you're having to toad up the contents of a schooner So it's like a time for a special master and have that person walk through and see what all of the various bales of wheat way on your schooner in 1792 where there's a dispute over it But he was just like Let's have you decide the case Larry. I read your book and it was very good And Larry was like done and so we set up an office in Griswold Hall I was his law clerk Larry's that is To try to decide the Microsoft case which as Sam is showing Microsoft was none too happy about And they wanted to have Larry removed from the case and they said he was terribly biased Judge Jackson was not impressed It went up to the DC Circuit on a writ of mandamus asking for emergency relief that Larry Lessig be removed from the case and The DC Circuit granted the writ of mandamus So despite the excitement here about Larry Lessig's appointment. He was Thrown off of the case not because he was biased but because it turns out for those of you who are law students If you're going to have a federal case You are owed through your taxpayer money and basic fairness a federal judge who's been approved by the Senate and nominated by the president to Hear your case not a law professor that the judge asks to hear it for him I don't know why that should be the case But it turns out it was an article 3 issue as they say But it was wonderful to have really delved into this case that at the time was thought of as Almost the case of the century there was another case going on around that time as well that was not internet related and After he and therefore we got thrown off the case. We at least decided we could turn it into a seminar So he did a seminar on the Microsoft case where we read the transcripts and Pretended that we were the still the special masters and deciding the case With the students so an example though that this stuff was confusing. It was disputed and a sense of moment at the time that Had us say boy, we could actually make a difference and that I think in part led us as the sunny bono copyright term extension act of 1998 was passed retroactively extending the term of copyright by 20 years for nearly every copyright in America thereby preventing Steamboat Willie the first Mickey Mouse cartoon from entering the public domain and Cineplex is doing 3d Steve Boat Willie without having to pay Disney for the privilege the sunny bono act kept copyrights going and We were just sitting around one day and being like, you know, somebody should do something about that so we actually Worked with a couple would be plaintiffs who wanted to Rekey in works as they entered the public domain and have them come about For free and we brought a suit saying it was unconstitutional Challenges actually the enumerated powers in which copyright is to be for limited times in the United States to keep retroactively extending it this chart shows you The retroactive extensions and how copyright is getting longer and longer with this helpful dotted line showing Projected expiration as it's going to go and in fact at 20 years now 2018 will be an attempt no doubt to renew copyrights Retroactively even further which might mean that some of you have a chance to work on Eldred to the tired retread but somebody has to do it case that we brought so we lost in the district Court in record time it was like about a week before we were told we had lost and there was no need for hearing and We appealed to the DC circuit where we lost we appealed for re-hearing in the DC circuit Which we lost and we petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case and to Everybody's shock the Supreme Court agreed to hear our case which had the content industry sort of going OMG If this gets reversed could all of those retroactive extensions that had been on that chart all collapse like dominoes Leaving the length of copyright retroactively to 14 years Wouldn't that be? catastrophically fun so We argued Eldred versus Ashcroft in front of the Supreme Court and after that We lost seven to two and the state of the law afterwards was worse than where we had found it But that was okay. It was a lot of fun and You can see a wonderful 1994 website with all of the documents etc etc and then During the case we got this idea of something called copyrights commons That we ought to have something like a counter copyright a CC instead of a C on your work to indicate that you wanted to share it because it turned out that there was after the various Burn treaty amendments of 1976 there was no obvious way To say that you wanted to give a work to the public domain We actually asked lawyers like real lawyers not law professors like if I had a document I wanted to put into the public domain what magic words when I put at the bottom of it They're like we have no idea no one has ever asked us that before and that's really weird So we got this idea of counter copyright and that became creative commons this is the first 1994 style website for Creative commons saying that there ought to be a big library of stuff that people have voluntarily chosen to wave what rights They might otherwise have this is now the Creative Commons website, which is looking much more modern and This is one of the signal achievements of Larry's work and others at the Berkman Center Some of whom are in the audience today of Shepherding this project through from just an idea that somebody had in Pound Hall to now if you jump back to my slides you will see These are the licenses now and among the CC licenses by 2006 there were 50 million of them by 2014 almost a billion Creative Commons licenses many of them automatically facilitated by platforms like Flickr that Let you opt in and then as you do one photo after another Say that you want to be able to share it widely and then others can make great hay out of it So this is one example of just being able to say alright. There's an invitation to build here Let's build something and see what happens and my hypothesis is those invitations still exist. It feels crowded It feels like it's not 2006 anymore, but that's not true. There's still an open internet and web and enough Conflict over what the norms and standards and laws and practices should be that every single person in this room with Interest in having an impact on the way this digital system works has a chance to affect its future For which that is just not true about As true or as easy an energy policy in criminal justice policy in other areas where we might desperately want or seek reform but it just doesn't have this kind of easy access back in 2000 again the internet corporation for a sign named in numbers were formed I will not go into that entire story here, but it is a fascinating and rarely told story that someday we will talk about And I think Sam is about to go hunting for something I can related just to tempt me into telling some part of the story But I'm not going to do it The home page is still going to be pretty boring. It's going to be oh, that's the Wikipedia page Which is even more boring but it was founded in Its very first meeting was down the street in Kendall Square and again people from the Berkman Center had a huge hand in forming it And in what we saw at the time I think wrongly but at the time I saw as a Constitutional convention for cyberspace which got the constitutional lawyer types really excited and when it turned out not to be a Constitutional convention for cyberspace Larry kept that in mind and later was like let's hold another Constitutional convention he really wants to hold a constitutional convention and he may yet Do that so we ended up very involved in the governance questions around ICANN including the mechanics of how to have a meeting that is going to be quite sparsely attended wherever it's physically located Here in Yokohama, but there could be tens of people still interested around the world in participating And that was good because in 2000 streaming technology isn't what it was What it is today? I should alert you by the way we're streaming this live probably to tens of people So hello out there anyone in Yokohama who's listening to us but working on those technologies was another way in which mixing praxis and Norm and what Kendra Albert actually is just studying as predictive and prescriptive technologies We figured that should be something coming from a research center and one with dot org mindset rather than comm This is actually part of our dashboard where you could watch Mike Roberts president of ICANN Speaking and remember the real player those were good times very good times And of course today. It's now caught the attention of more than tens of people and Urs Gasser our Executive director has been working hard with organizations like the World Economic Forum who discovered the internet about two years ago We're like this is really exciting Hello everybody in Geneva and To help them figure out how to take the vast network that they're tapped into and have them Productively contributing to the collective hallucination of the internet rather than trying to do a winner take all Kind of things so yeah, there's their new initiative on internet governance that was started for which It already hit wonderfully interesting challenges as it got going But as you can see it was just last year that organizations of this sort have taken it up I think in some important respects at least individually we think of ourselves as kind of the Loraxes who speak for the trees Which always yields the risk of self righteousness, but we find ourselves corrected early and often by the internet masses So we're not at risk of thinking that we're Doing great things if indeed we're we're not another great project that started the Berkman Center global voices online which was the idea that these blogs might be taking off and They should be taking off around the world not just in places that were already decently wired or had good internet connectivity and citizen Connection with it and global voices turned out to spin out then and there are a number of global voices Bloggers still working today Sam's gonna go visit global voices now and see what it looks like. I didn't check to see if there it is excellent and You can see it's a 2015 website that immediately interrupts you and import tunes you But this is a great example of a chance to hear from people around the world who otherwise might not have the venue to do so see if you can jump back and We actually had the first broad based blog site Dave Weiner and some others who were really into blogging when it first got going Started blogs.law.harvard.edu. I love this. Here's a demo of a picture I'm going to put the picture into the page. Isn't that cool? So 2003 doesn't seem that long ago to many of us But there's a picture in a page and of course it's snowing in Boston Which is pretty much par for the course in February of 2003 and there are some folks here who have I think I saw Phil Greenspan you're here, right? I see Phil. Phil you do blogs.law I think you're responsible for probably 90% of the hits to blogs.law actually so a walking example of Zip's law in action and Doc Searle's also on blogs.law for which we're now trying to figure out. Why are we running a blog server in? 2015 why aren't you guys on blogger? So Yeah, so we may well be foisting you on someone else at some point, but it's a great example of Something that we sort of leap into early on and sometimes Success is becoming normal and just usual rather than Something rare and unusual Of course serving the internet can result in still inscrutable errors like this socket error remote network unreachable and Around 1999 2000 I had heard rumor that there were a lot of sites you couldn't get to if you were in China and Others heard the same rumor and I'm like, you know, there are like 1.5 billion people over there Okay, we just ask one of them somebody actually got a major foundation grant to fly to China go to a cyber cafe Ask for a few sites take some notes and leave I was like that's that's research so we got the idea of Dialing an international long-distance call from Griswold Hall as if we were traveling to like a hotel in Beijing and calling the IBM net Access point in Beijing and then asking for one website after another to see what was focused Filtered in a more rigorous way And we generated the first definitive list of things that were filtered in China as a result in a six-week exploratory project that was Quite tragically ended when the phone bill came to the dean It was like this is not cool and That was the end of that but we went to other methods to try to do it and generated by 2002 Some of the first tests of what was filtered in China and then compared it with other countries It turns out that Baptist churches at the time were the most filtered things in the world Like the Saudis and the Chinese don't agree on much But Baptist churches have got to go is a common tenant between them And those are the sorts of many things that jump out when you do this this kind of research then became the Open net initiative which was a joint effort to track the evolving ways and when censorship was taking place These are Jing Jing and Cha Cha the internet police of the city of Shenzhen You should all strictly limit your own behavior on the web and together we will have harmonious A healthy internet environment to maintain harmonious internet order see you often Which is a very ambiguous statement from Jing Jing and Cha Cha. I don't know Sam what you were about to search for but There they are and we ended up writing this up in a book called access denied with a cover and That became part of a three-part series of Filtering taking place around the world shepherded by Rob Ferris our research director who was here and many others to really try to figure out For the benefit of fellow scholars for journalists for others What's going on as this any point to any point communication thing around the world is Happening and where you can't get it. I think Yeah, here are some examples of the maps we came up with of filtering Out of the open net initiative and if you jump back to my slides I can show a kind of time sequence This is one of our reports in 2007 in the best Zimbabwe news site on the World Wide Web New Zimbabwe.com they reported that Zimbabwe has been given the all-clear in a survey of countries which censor the Internet So this is our Organization that released the study Zimbabwe getting the all-clear because topping the list was Azerbaijan followed by Bahrain China was fourth while Ethiopia made an entry on fifth Are you getting a sense of the ordering of the list that might not be by prevalence of filtering? It included Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia and Zimbabwe came out last Zimbabwe came out last with Iser by John coming first. That's right. It was alphabetical So that was too bad, but the other kinds of things that we discovered were Filtering upon filtering so among the ventures run by the US government at the time were to make sure that Iranians could get to sites that were being blocked in Iran by offering a circumvention Tool paid for with US taxpayer dollars through a service called anonymizer only available to those in Iran But then the worry was what if the Iranians use it to get to porn at which point the American tax dollars are funding The porn habits of Iranians that doesn't sound good So they asked the anonymizer people to filter the tool that allows the circumvention of filtering which The anonymizer people got up at the crack of noon to kind of half-heartedly filter the tool that's supposed to unblock the filtering and the result which Yes, that's them announcing how great they are, but we then found that They what they did was they looked for certain keywords in the URL So if ass appeared anywhere you couldn't get there through the circumvention tool which meant us Mbasi.state.gov was out breast was out bush was out, which was quite something and What's wrong with old? I mean I know about rule 34, but come on Anyway, I love how soft was also not permitted So these are the kinds of things that got us in trouble with the US government and stopped our funding for quite a while from those Quarters, but that's the price of good and solid research That was probably blocked by the anonymizer And of course we also thought that we live in a distributed world Wouldn't be nice if people as they couldn't get somewhere could report it And then as the reports are coming in kind of like ways figures out where traffic is happening by the people driving themselves If we could get to a sense of where the web itself is Being blocked and that started our herdict project, which today is represented in our internet monitor dashboard project run by several people in the room including Rebecca Hacock and several others and This is about to go live this fall Which has a variety of ways of trying to measure the open web, which is just waiting to be measured now Nobody does measure it which is weird So we're like all right we'll do it But it's there to be measured because it is a collective hallucination that anybody can crawl or scan Unlike say the demographics of Facebook which only Facebook knows and if you try to crawl Facebook You'll be in trouble with Facebook and no more Facebook for you So to the extent that we're still an open web or open internet to be able to get these Demographics and have a pair of headlights Shining on where we're driving seems actually quite important. It's the kind of thing just like even figure out how many people are online You know AT&T can tell you how many people are using their data plan right now And Facebook can tell you how many members they have but the internet can't tell you how many people they have Which is why when Wikipedia had one abusive user so abusive that even Wikipedia's Famed deep patience was exhausted and they finally blocked the IP address of this vandal It turned out to be the proxy IP address used by everyone in Qatar and The headline the next day was like Wikipedia blocks all of Qatar from Wikipedia, which was unfortunate I think a man. Sorry Samantha's gonna find This happening q a t a r. Oh You're using the yeah, there it is Wikipedia bans Qatar home to nearly a million people has been blocked from any due to a large volume of space This is similar to the time that at the Berkman Center We got an email from Macedonia once the country of Macedonia Saying that so much spam had originated from there that many internet routers were just ignoring all bits from Macedonia So they're like if you get this message help Like one of those things of like, huh? And again, there's like nobody they can call to just like remove the block It's just everybody hates you Macedonia. I'm sorry and that's sad. That's very sad. So we digress There's also a now a network of centers that Berkman is spearheading That we're trying to get around the world who study this stuff We'll be able to compare notes and work from where they are on these kinds of questions. So what's our next interval? What are we doing? There's a ton of different projects going on you saw a bunch of them next door at the science fair I hope you signed up for information on at least one of them and it's hard to figure out an organizing theme We are a bottom-up organization So we're not that much into like five-year plans and this is what we will be growing in the terrarium But my own assessment of what we kind of tend to look at these days subject to change are the three P's platforms Privacy and public discourse privacy kind of comes in and out of focus for us over the years Lately both with government surveillance and a lot of the stuff courtesy of the Snowden leaks Has new focus on that and we have a project going in which we take current senior NSA officials and lock them in a room with the likes of Bruce Schneier famed crypto anarchist and Fellow board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and just watch to see what happens So like you know pizza goes in one end and a really interesting position paper comes out the other end And so that alone is worth the price of admission But we're also looking at Corporate privacy practices and some of the new uses of big data That are going on platforms of course are the intermediaries that more and more stand to govern our lives and I don't know if Post 2002 in the Microsoft case we would have thought that there would be for every major online functionality we perceive today one Primary offerer of it. That's very unweb like didn't have to be that way But maybe it's the kind of thing that has a natural monopoly with network effects So studying those platforms and relating to them is a big part of what many of our projects do and finally public discourse Charlie was fond of saying very early on and still does that the internet is a rhetorical space And it's a space of discourse of various kinds and figuring out how that discourse gets shaped and what you can Be able to accomplish online and the double-edged nature of it The fact that abuse can happen online to individuals and basically drive them out of spaces I think as these days recognized at least as much of a problem as traditional government based Censorship of people wanting to get a message out against great descent and all three of these you'll find represented I think in various projects for my own part I've been really interested in such things as this experiment from 2010 in which Facebook wanted to see if they could get a Statistically significant number of people out to the polls by just including in your news feed that little banner at the top that says it's election day click here if you voted and here are some of your friends who did vote and It turned out a statistically significant increase in the number of voters who went out happened leading to the hypothetical of well, what if they just showed that to Republicans or Democrats depending on whom you don't like and Just showed it to them and didn't show it to others. Would you be wronging the people to whom you did not show that? That notice and you might be changing the outcome of the election Is that just regular old electioneering or is that something evil and abuse of a platform that's supposed to be your friend not supposed to be Electing the person the platform wants to see elected by directing you to the polls or not depending on what they think you're going to do And let's be clear they have a good sense of what you're going to do If you take a look this wonderful study that shows that during the hundred days before a relationship starts Facebook observes a slow but steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the future couple Facebook knows you're going to date before you do and You could see a wonderful service offered to future parents-in-law Giving them a preview of the relationship and asking if they'd like Facebook to send them off to vote instead Rather than allowing that to gel Privacy platforms public discourse all three represented in this kind of stuff and it's also to me a great Issue of the future of academia it used to be that academia had the economies of scale the government funding the Interest in questions that don't have immediate commercial impact that this is where Really interesting enduring if non-commercial questions were asked and answered This is a really interesting question. We can't run this study without Facebook Facebook can run this study without us if you are a freshly minted data scientist Where would you like to be spending your time at Facebook or here? That's a tough question If you do it at Facebook, you might be hurting America But if you helping your career and if you do it here, you might be helping America But not having the data to go. I kid only a little on that front this wonderful experiment With a terrible buzzfeed like title I love how the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences itself engages in a be tested clickbait Experimental evidence of massive scale emotional contagion through if you read this article It's like the ring or something But this example which boils down to like some social science research and now I'm just throwing out chum to my social science colleagues if you get happy posts in Your posts out are happy and if you get sad posts in you tend to share sad stuff who knew well this proves that and That then led to a histrionic reaction of how many people have committed Suicide as a result of this very experiment giving them sad posts to see what they in turn Do out yes, so there's All of this yes Facebook oops getting along with others is the essence of getting ahead Thank You William Feather So Facebook manipulated user so these kinds of things from this This guy saying how terrible it was this is again a great time to be on the cusp between Academia and the industries that are the platforms that we're engaging with day in and day out And how to deal with this is a problem that we haven't figured out yet. Let's jump back to the deck So I want to make sure to leave time for some questions and such So let me talk just a little bit about the modalities through which a place like the Berkman Center and we're unique Goes about the work that it does because we are not defined by a methodological Orthodoxy we started at this law school, but we're university-wide among our fellows and affiliates are a huge range of disciplines including non academics and practitioners and So here are some of the things that do tend to draw a line through all of the work that goes on One is as exemplified by Yochai Bankler's book on the wealth of networks a particular interest in Distributed in cooperative approaches the kinds of approaches that got the internet and the web going to begin with These approaches might be very helpful and often overlooked to solve the problems often when we see a problem online Whether it's online abuse or spam or d-dossing you name it. It's where's the sheriff? Who can we find that can actually lower the boom but figuring out how to collectively and through lots of Individuals who alone can't do anything but together can those sorts of approaches tend to animate a number of our projects Still as a hypothesis not as a conclusion it might turn out that in instances It doesn't work, but these are tend to be under explored solutions The other kind of approach that you'll see among our projects a lot are that we swing for the fences We go for the a plus or the C more than we do the B or B plus if we're doing something It's like you read the thing or you experience a website and you're like That's pretty good. That's bad for us. We want Reactions that are like wow I never thought of that and then it might be followed by that's really cool Or what a total waste of taxpayer dollars We'll go for that bimodal distribution over the merely adequate kind of yeah, right? I'm glad somebody's doing that and that's the sort of work that we We aim for and I think on a related note I don't know if this is still true It might be that the city of Austin has become a caricature of itself and probably all of you were going to South by Southwest next spring but there is this sense of keep Austin weird and I think there's a sense of keep Berkman weird as well that we're in one of the more sort of big in the public eye Universities with the crimson and the mahogany and and a very big endowment and stuff like that and I think we look at it as a chance to Go off-roading a lot Rather than constantly worrying about risking our reputation and such that the reputation is there to be risked rather than to be Just sort of doing the expected Thing and I think that animates a lot of the Berkman Center's way of looking at things This was actually I think from Nate Matthias one of our returning fellows. I don't know if he's here But Nate did a guide to being a Berkman fellow for which this played prominently and I hope everybody sleeps well tonight So it is kind of this characters welcome sort of Feel to it, but not in a contrived way I'd like to think and I can't help but say for the characters welcome motto There's this wonderful yahoo answers remember yahoo answers thread What does characters welcome mean when they advertise it? I hear this every time and I'm just curious as to what this means So the best answer was that's their slogan. It's in reference to their TV shows For example, Monk is a character the guys from psych are characters, etc Can't argue with that. I Give this answer a b-plus so which therefore makes it the best answer so our goal as a center as a convening place is to satisfy the lower layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs so that each of you Can do the great work that you have within you that you're not sweating the small stuff that you're having a community of People with whom you can share an idea that you might have no idea, but be willing and interested We'll have then the calendar of events that even as busy students or Practitioners or wherever else you may be hailing from there'll be a chance to go to something That gets you thinking and maybe changes the way you think or gives you an opportunity to change the way others think and Creating this is the kind of thing that requires a ton of work that people like Becca Tabasky and Dan Jones and oars and So many others who's Kriegsman engage in Day in and day out at the Berkman Center so that that substrate is there for great and weird and Momentous things to grow and that's basically what we're about So those are the sorts of dispositions that try to drive our work. We realize life is short There's a lot of things any of us could be doing we want to be spending our time doing stuff that matters and is new And we hope that you'll be joining us in that venture so with that Let me just say welcome, and then we'll open it up interactively, but thank you very much Get ready to drive all right Questions comments and for those running out there's food next door I don't know why I'm privileging you since you should stay before you eat it, but I think there is food next door Anybody want to react say something ask something introduce him or herself So I'm gonna give this to I got a question for you go for it Charlie Nessan our founder How did you get to be so smart? Yes our arrangement There's no trick to it. It's just a simple trick Yeah, so sign up today for our five-point plan on increasing your internet smarts But really Charlie. It's all thanks to you The tiger is mollified Shall thank you for for the presentation I really like the sort of historical approach you took I just wanted to ask you To what extent do you think the core principles of the internet back at the time like and to end principle open-ended Ness and Decentralization are still true today, and do you think they will be sustainable in the new future? Oh, that's the 64 euro question, and I Guess I would say like so many of these questions. I find myself torn in two directions So here's what's going in one direction the internet has so much inertial momentum to it It can't even upgrade itself from IP version 4 to IP version 6 don't ask what happened to IP version 5 and That's amazing That's amazing that it's going so strong and is so flexible and generative that even obvious Improvements to how it would work are really hard to implement because people are still pretty much satisfied and hung up upon V1 as it were in this case v4 so there's that and For the web to still be going strong today for things still to be advertised with URLs and dub dub dub dot like that's pretty cool I don't know how we explain that toward the next generation like why you're typing dots and crap, but Very cool now pulling the other direction is the world of the app and the world of Shiny gizmos that you click on something and it happens and of course the more it happens It's like what am I defending you all should have to use keyboards and type shit like that doesn't make sense But the more and more we rely as is happening on a Siri Cortana on some advisor to shepherd us through which will really just become our 24-7 concierge as you navigate the world and ask for informational help as you do it That's feeding through a pipeline that may have found its way to you through the device that you bought or through a Subscription that you entered into years ago But then ended up storing all your photos with or whatever that becomes very hard to abandon and in fact one of the biggest worries I've had about the Distributed nature of the internet web is basically the massive vacuum that Google has been applying to recent PhDs They just all go work for Google and it means they can make a really good search engine And you know Microsoft can hire a bunch of PhDs and try to make one that competes and they're working on it But in the meantime the promise of a very rich data web One in which anybody could write a search engine over the weekend and produce interesting results starts to recede so that's the stuff point in the other Direction and I don't know that there's ever going to be just like one big final battle Lord of the Rings style to determine it But a lot of little battles along the way and the kinds of stuff we try to do One example. I mentioned just yesterday All right, Sam. I'm going to try to use your computer. This is dangerous. Let's see. All right. There we are so if There we are So let's go to amber link org and there you will see This is a production of the Berkman Center and the idea is to Allow any website that offers up links and might be itself subject to a denial of service or other attack or blockage To have its links mirrored by other websites that normally point into it, but only point into it Don't cash the content this would allow those websites to cash content for one another so that you can actually have a rich Distributed web of stuff rather than a brittle app that if the app goes down It's all over or trying to host every website at Amazon whatever website it is That's an example of trying a very small way to fight part of the battle to keep a substrate for a free and open internet going Yep Feel free to tell us who you are. Will Zachman. Hello. Will Zach fellow comp you serve sysop from back in the day We're a long way from Canopus Toto. Yes You said something earlier that I didn't really you sort of alluded to something that I didn't quite know what you were saying You said that Who would have thought After the Microsoft suit so many years later, there would only be one Provider each for something and I didn't quite get what your reference was I'm curious to know what you had mine. So what I had in mind was in 2015 and let me be clear America if you are Micro blogging you're using Twitter like I don't know. This is a weird group. How many are using identica to emote Congratulations, maybe you can make some friends today. I you know, right exactly as the Simpsons say the first fax machine is Really just a waffle iron with a telephone attached. You need other people To do it. So if you're micro blogging, how many people are on Twitter? Okay, that's That's a market that's hard to contest if you are Engaging in friendly relations with others friending them and following their their updates in longer than a hundred and 40 characters How many of you are on Facebook? Okay, how many of you are on what's something that's Facebook, but not It's like a game show or something 200 for what's that one called that the NYU students did? Diaspora, how many are diasporans? Excellent, maybe you guys can have a party at the reception and Talk about using diaspora, which I'm sure you're all plugged into right now But wait somebody else was shouting something really confidently Live journal any live journalists among us? All right, that's a community and that's actually a community for which if everybody else joined live journal You guys would be like that's terrible live journals gone straight to hell So there's great to have sort of a federated system of stuff But talk about zip's law a power law of like 99% of the people are on 1% of the sites that offer the functionality Linked in Well, I'll sleep better at night knowing I've got linked in as my backup to Facebook I just got to say this is terrible because I know we're streaming and this is being recorded forever I can't stand linked in Thank you If you if nothing else comes out of this meeting Let's storm linked in headquarters and tell them we want to remove a connection and we don't know how Much less removing two at once like so It does have a lot of use and An interesting phenomenon I'm noticing lately is that a lot of Young people Graduating from college or that are getting to be seniors in college Yes are moving off Facebook to linkedin because they think linkedin is much better for them in their careers than Facebook I love how they just leapt fraud right from my space into linkedin. Well Yeah They went from my space to Facebook Yes, but a lot of them are moving and it does lead to the platform's question of is it meet the new boss same as the old Boss, I mean to what extent is the kind of competition what you will would recognize as CompuServe versus AOL versus Delphi versus Prodigy. There's so much choice among These staid services that sell you stuff at 10 cents a minute Right exactly exactly I wanted to ask are there others who want to weigh in on this and particularly by reference to maybe introducing a project But there might just be a question there. Go ahead Becca. You want to find the mic? Yeah Oh Kimia Tell us about the Center for Research on Computation and Society Does anyone know John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences? Otherwise known as circus sees exactly Yeah, there is never a room with this many Berkman's and inside unless you're here So I'm gonna take advantage of this opportunity. I just wanted to introduce you guys. You're gonna let me finish Yes I can't believe I just likened myself to Taylor Swift. That's just not good So we host CRCS hosts postdocs and faculty members that are largely computer scientists But we host these computer computer scientists that work in a variety of different fields And contribute to a lot of different fields through their interdisciplinary work So I feel like, you know, they have a lot of in common with for the Berkman Center and there's a lot of synergy there So we would like to invite all of you guys to come to our open house tomorrow We'll go over some of the projects that we have at CRCS and the goals that we have for the year It's gonna be at 5 o'clock tomorrow in the Harvard School lawn and we also have a symposium coming up in two weeks it's called It's called societal impact through computing research So please if I have not spammed you already, feel free to contact me My name is Kimia Mayvon. If you Google me, I'll come up It's not very private And then we also have Boy that careened into depression really quickly We also have bi-weekly seminars and on the off weeks of that we host Informal discussions talking about things that are going on in the news and media and how technology can use be used to solve those problems So definitely Berkman kind of sorry Berkman kind of minds are the kind of minds we would like at these meetings and these events So please again Kimia Mayvon and CRCS.cs.harvard.edu Thank You Kimia. That's very well time. Why don't you just hand hand it either forward to willow or back to Dave Talbot I just as a sort of I'm cold-calling. I know you didn't raise your hand Willow's looking panicked so pass it to Dave Everybody my name Dave just tell us about your project Well, I'm glad you you gave me this this introduction because I had a small issue earlier And I wasn't at my table as as diligently as I should have been so if any of you are interested in local government and Community broadband municipal fiber efforts. We're trying to catalyze efforts here in the state of Massachusetts educate cities and towns about what they can do Why they should do it why they can save money for the municipality aid economic development? And I'll make myself available tomorrow at 10 a.m. And give you guys a personal briefing to make up for my earlier lap So there I've admitted it by humiliating moment earlier, and that's what you all to share that moment Not all Berkman Fellows and affiliates are as self-flagellating, but we welcome it and Try to set the bar high where should people go at 10 a.m. But the Berkman Center in the in the kitchen and I'll be there for you in the kitchen at 23 Everett Where there will be hors d'oeuvres at at 10 a.m. I'll make coffee for you just love send me an email say how you like your coffee and But it's a new project this that was started this year very excited about it We have a case study out We have a lot of projects we want to do in the next academic year and it's a real important issue for for Communities in Massachusetts and beyond and David somebody who's been a writer and editor at technology review MIT's We're very extremely well-regarded magazine for how long David. Oh Several 14 years, okay So he's been reviewing technology for quite a long time and now as Mark Twain would say everybody talks about the weather But nobody ever does anything about it now You're doing something about it and it was a thing of beauty to see in the room where we just had the science fair David gathered about 50 folks from around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who run municipal power entities these are co-ops for the most part and To have them thinking about how they might be delivering broadband and it was just fascinating to see them thinking in a new way about what they're Doing and they don't do that very often they don't get together to learn from each other And so that's what we're trying to do. Yes, and I don't know Susan I should I cold call you Susan professor Susan Crawford either to talk about this effort or any other that you want to Talk about well, it's great to hear Dave talk about team fiber because of the country We are to Norway as Cuba is to us. We have a long way to go That's going to take a long time and I'm Susan Crawford I'm a new professor here, and I'm delighted to be in the room and to see all the energetic twinkling faces around this place is great and if you're interested in local government in use of fiber around the world in Stories about how government is trying to do its job better using technology and engagement citizens I'd love to talk to you and I I'm sort of a Berkman project because without Jonathan Zittra I would not be here and I'm very grateful to Without Susan I would not be People are like, are we clapping? Are we not clapping? Totally optional Okay, I just time for maybe just a couple more questions or interjections or announcements of stuff. Yes Hello, I am Barry shine Back around 1986 when I was in charge of most of Boston University's network We put two ten megabit Dishes between it here William James at Harvard and be you and we fund the mailing list with MIT be you and Harvard and the first question that was asked was How are we going to control them in other words if one of my students misbehaves I Know what to do if one of your students misbehaves on my network. We have no process for this Yes, we don't have no paperwork. Yes, right in 1989 Three or four years later when I began allowing the public on the internet for the first time Okay The first thing Steve Wolf asked me over the National Science Foundation was how are we going to control them? Okay, what are you going to do if they misbehave? Yes? I mean it's astounding. I mean because you said that was the end of your talk Yeah, and it's astounding how this has been a constant thing of how are we going to control them? Yeah, and yet somehow we have very little control over them and it marches on right without us and I so I Happily agree as a 30 years, right But also see how much in say the past two years That irony that you note there or just observation. It's like how do we control this when it's like it pretty much controls itself reminiscent of John Perry Barlow's declaration of the independence of cyberspace written in 1996 after a bender at Davos and This thing is as lyrical as it gets And that's fair since he's a lyricist Governments of the industrial world you weary giants of flesh and steel I come from cyberspace the new home of mind on behalf of the future I ask you with a past to leave us alone. You have no sovereignty where we gather Etc. Etc. This is like a wonderful Kind of Jeremiah But it's also something that has been sorely tested over the past two or three years again as we've seen people trying to go about their business and participate online and Be grieved for it at whatever corner they turn now if it's some part of like World of Warcraft you can just play Zelda I don't know I Don't know what the kids are doing these days but if it's Twitter you're not going to go play identica and Figuring out how to deal with that in a way that doesn't make you The parental foghorn and Charlie Brown who just wants the kids to stop being kids is a wonderful puzzle and it's actually I should just note the EFF which John Perry is one of the co-founders of the EFF itself released a Report on social media and abuse. Let's see if Google Facing the challenge of online harassment and this was a really interesting document for somebody like the electronic frontier Foundation to come up with because it is acknowledging some of the ways in which that Irony has been complicated and that's something for which Bruce Schneier Whitney Aaron Bosel and others Did a workshop on that and maybe Bruce you want to say a couple words about that actually I you're looking So in June we brought researchers Researchers it was people from companies Activists feel from government to talk about misogyny on the internet And it was really the first time all the different groups got together and had a serious discussion of problems Solutions ways forward and it's something that's going to continue a group was was formed the groups continuing online And when we'll meet again, and I think this is a really big move forward because these divergent groups often just don't talk Yes, and this is just a way of saying that we are I think quite proudly and self-consciously a big tent There's not a whole lot of ideological baggage that you have to Fledge allegiance to in order to participate in the Berkman Center activities, and in fact it's in the disagreements That we often thrive the most even in the Eldred case. I was talking about Arthur Miller not the playwright But the law professor wrote a brief on the other side as to why we were totally wrong and sadly his brief Prevealed will oh you're gonna say something and one of the things that keeps coming out in the the workshop that we had and also One of the projects that I've been working on kind of what the night social is that the tactics that we hate other people using Are also the tactics that we use where suddenly we are able to hear anyone on the internet using a term that we don't like Whether they're on our side or the other side and I have really enjoyed that at the Berkman Center We have not said well that one tactic is not okay or whatever else but we continue to complicate the matter and Make sure that the people who are being shouted down still have a chance to speak And that the idea to respond to negative speech is not Censorship but more speech. Yes, great. So With that applause Let me invoke the zero-width rule of Berkman Center Operations, which is we should never turn a meeting into a hostage crisis. So I think we're gonna bring this in for a landing Thank you all very much for coming out