 I can split my life into two halves, you know, before the internet and after the internet. And the internet has completely changed my life. And if it weren't for the internet and all of the opportunity that it's given me, I wouldn't have my life. I wouldn't have my education. I wouldn't have my friends. I wouldn't have anything. And so I just can't imagine a life without the internet and I wouldn't be myself. So that's just sort of a prelude for anyone here who's not an internet believer. You have to kind of suspend your disbelief and assume that the internet is a good thing. I'll make some descriptions about what I mean by that. But first, I'm sorry if this makes you seasick, but this slide had to be upside down. So this is how innovation used to work before the internet. So what you would have is you had experts, most of them wearing neckties, who came from illustrious universities who would convene in these annual meetings at places like the ITU, and they would sit around and try to think about and talk about and anticipate every opportunity, every possible problem, and they would sit for years and years and years and deliberate. And these deliberations would create these specifications that you could measure by meters. So 3G, a lot of the technology we have, all of the fundamental infrastructure that we have today was based on specifications that were designed by these experts that were chosen by large companies and governments to get together. And they were really the smartest bunch, and they really were smart people. And what they would do is they'd create these specifications that were so large and so complex that no one person could ever read the whole thing. And they were digested by large contractors and research labs, and they were transformed into big devices and big infrastructure. And they would be rolled out costing billions and billions of dollars. And so, for instance, our cell phone network is designed in this way. And that is then consumed by us, consumers. And we use the cell phones, and we use this technology. We use this infrastructure. And that money gets paid as fees and taxes back to these big companies, and the cycle goes around and around again. And this is what you would define as sort of the large, centrally planned IT development that we had before the internet. And we still have this, and this is not a completely obsolete model. This is important when you're rolling out very stable infrastructure, and you really, really need to minimize all risk. And there's a lot of government involved. There's a new kind of innovation that the internet has enabled, which I would call internet innovation. And the internet innovation, all of us, are kind of at the same level, right? So you've got the users, the venture capitalists, the standards organizations, small companies, big companies, we all get together, and we talk about it online. We talk about it on Facebook. We talk about it on our blogs. And a lot of the standards bodies, you can have teenagers can participate. Anyone who has something to contribute can join in. A lot of this happens on mailing lists. And one of the credos that the internet engineering task force has is they say rough consensus running code. Which basically, let's chat about what we want to do, but let's just write something, let's work on it, and let's let it evolve. And it's much more about evolution. David Weinberger, who is one of my favorite authors, has a term that he calls Small Pieces Loosely Joined. So imagine the old days, it's big entities, well-funded. Most of the cool things that happened on the internet started by small people, small groups of people loosely joined by loose standards. So the first browsers were created by a couple of people, FTP clients, some of the best blog software. In fact, just about every good company that I've invested in, I'm an early stage investor in things like Flickr and Twitter and others. I've invested when they're very, very early stage with just a couple of people. And so everything is kind of flat, everything is very agile. So it's again, it's sort of an evolution thing. Sometimes it doesn't always work. For instance, when we created the email standard, we didn't anticipate spam. So for a few years, we all suffered from spam. But what happened was instead of trying to centrally plan the solution, we allowed the market to try to create solutions for spam filters. Gmail made a very good spam filter. And eventually the system healed itself. And this is also a very good important metaphor that I like to use. It's kind of, if you think about biological systems. Biological systems and internet is actually a very similar kind of mapping. We talk a lot about robust systems. So if you think about the immune system, the immune system, if you're a child, you fall, you hurt your knee, you get sick, and you start to build up your brain and your immune system to be robust against attacks. If you raise a child in a clean room, they will become unable to defend themselves against germs outside. Similarly, if you're not from India, it's very difficult to eat all the food here. All these things you get not by surgically tuning the person to be robust against microbes in India, you get it by living here and eating the food. So similarly, instead of centrally planning every single possible problem, what the internet does is it builds an immune system by having hackers, having failure, and then recovering from the failure. But the key, other key thing is that the cost of failure is very low if it happens early. So the key sort of DNA of the internet, and this is the philosophy, and this is the core, and you need to understand this even if you're not an engineer, is the internet is made up of what I would call layers, and they create a stack. And depending on how technical you are, you may count more layers in this. So when the web came out, a lot of people said, oh, why do we need the web? We already have Gofor and we've got FTP. We can go and read a citation and we can go find it in the university. We don't really need the web. What the web did was, again, it removed a whole other layer of friction so that somebody writing some content on one machine could open it in a browser on another machine and you could view the source of somebody else's website. I remember I made one of the first websites in Japan and we just looked at everybody else's websites and figured it out on their own. And the key was the specification about how to make a website was just a few pages long, a couple of kids could make a website. And all of these are very important because they increase interoperability, they lower friction, they allow participation without asking permission, which is also key because in the old days, you had to have a government stamped device could only be connected to the modem, to the telephone plug. The key to the internet was that allowed these teenagers and hackers on the internet to create telecommunications devices, to create routers, enable things like Cisco and 3Com. And so each of these layers create an explosion of innovation, dramatically lowered costs, and made the network available to everyone. And what I would argue is that the next layer of friction right now is the copyright layer. So what's happening is you're creating this, so for instance, when we create these ISPs, the cost also has decreased substantially. So in the old days, if you wanted to make a joint venture documentary between two people, what you do is you'd fly to Cannes and you'd sip champagne and you cut the $20 million co-production deal. And you'd pay your lawyers $10,000, $100,000. And within the transaction cost, it didn't seem like a lot of money. But what's happened with the stack and the lowering of the cost of transaction is, and also because cameras and video recorders and computers have gotten so cheap, that the cost of creating content, the cost of collaboration, the cost of communication has gotten so low that now suddenly that $10,000 lawyer fee in order to create a legal document to allow two people to transact has become a substantial burden and a barrier. So just like we got the network engineers out of the way, and we got the software engineers out of the way, and by the way we didn't fire them, we got them to move on to more interesting work. We're trying to get the lawyers out of the way so that we can lower the cost of transactions of content. And again, so that the lawyers don't have to spend their time clearing rights, they can go on to do more interesting things. So the other key thing about these open standards is they're not intergovernmental agencies. They're not ITU, they're not under government. These are ad hoc communities. The Internet Engineering Task Force runs the lower layers of the internet, open protocols, it's an ad hoc nonprofit. The Worldwide Web Consortium that was founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, it operates and manages the Worldwide Web Standards and allows the browsers and others to communicate. And my organization Creative Commons, we work in the legal layer. So we create legal and technical tools that allow you to share. What this means to be a little bit more specific is we've figured out basically what sorts of things people, permissions people would like to grant, and what sort of restrictions people would like to permit. And I think it's better to give some examples. I picked some diversity of examples so you can understand. For instance, architecture for humanity, this is a nonprofit organization of architects who want to contribute to architectural designs that other people can use without paying. So one of their award-winning architectural designs is for community centers. And all of these architects have worked on together. They use a Creative Commons license, which means that all of the architects who participate agree that anyone can use these architectural designs as long as they provide attribution. And our license provides Google and other search engines, the ability to search for these free things and it creates a legal framework so that the people who use these architectural designs to create a community center know that they're doing it legally. We have our licenses, our legal documents, their technical tools and their metadata, and they've imported to 60 different languages and 60 different jurisdictions through a network of volunteers. So people in all over the world are now using the architectural designs. Wikipedia, for instance, uses a Creative Commons license. And again, to explain a little bit about how it's similar to the internet and how interoperability works, Flickr, which is one of the companies I founded very early, they allow you to choose a Creative Commons license for your photograph. So, for instance, if I take a picture of Cameron and I put on their Creative Commons attribution, which means you can use it as long as you provide attribution, all the Wikipedia community people know that they can use that photo without asking permission. So the Wikipedians have a feed of Flickr photos that are coming in and they all look at them and if there are articles that they match with, the Wikipedians can then use the picture of Cameron without asking permission because permission has already been granted when I upload it. This is very similar to how when a web server is serving a web page and my browser can read the browser because we have a standardized method of explaining, this is an image, this is some text, this is a link. Similarly, when we're exchanging content, we want to know that this content can be used for non-commercial use only. This content can only be shared if it's re-licensed under the same license. So it's a standard for sharing based on what the intention of the creator is. The other key thing about Wikipedia I'll say is that their license that they choose is called a share-like license, which means you can do anything you want with Wikipedia content as long as you share back the results. So you could translate a Wikipedia page into Hindi, but you have to also make that available for free. They used to use a different license, which is called the GFDL license. This gets a little bit technical, but I have to explain because it's important. So they had the same similar license that said you can share anything, you can do anything you want with Wikipedia, but you have to share it under GFDL. And then a lot of universities use Creative Commons license. This means that even though they say you can share it and do whatever you want as long as you share it on the same lines, since the two licenses were different, you couldn't mix Wikipedia content with this university content. And it took us four or five years to convince Wikipedia and the community to convert to Creative Commons, but now that it's converted, they can share with each other. So what's important about this is just the idea of free culture is important, but standardization is also important. It's like having two internets. If I can't send mail directly to you, it doesn't work. Interoperability may sound a little bit imperialistic, but it's important. Another big movement that we have is open educational resources. There are a lot of educators now creating open content and open educational resources under Creative Commons license. You have Vietnamese schools teaching MIT courseware in Vietnam. You have teachers sharing and collaborating with each other. And education is one of the sort of obvious things that should be shared. It seems obvious, but I'll explain a little bit later that it's very difficult for industry to get their head around it because there's been business models created around sort of protecting it. The Hewlett Foundation in the United States sort of spearheaded the opening of this open educational resources movement, but recently the White House has been putting billions of dollars behind open education. This is a huge movement that uses Creative Commons licenses. And TED is a Creative Commons user, so I'm sure you all know TED. And so TED videos, the reason that you're allowed to download and share TED videos without asking permission is because there's a little button at the, an icon at the end of the TED video that says it's being shared under Creative Commons license. So it's in the infrastructure. You may not see it everywhere. We have about 400 million pieces of content that are available under a Creative Commons license. And so what's happening is Creative Commons is trying to lower the cost of transaction between people who already want to share. So Hollywood and Madonna don't need Creative Commons. You know, when you have something you're already famous and all you need to do is control and gatekeep the value of your assets, Creative Commons isn't that important. Creative Commons is important if you want to be cited or if you want people to use your work as long as it's non-commercial. Many professionals are starting to use Creative Commons licenses. So what I will just focus on at the end then is that, I think education is one of the key areas that Creative Commons is very important because in the old days, if you think about it, the cost of convening and the cost of disseminating information was so high, right? So universities had to be very careful about dishing out this very scarce resources. They had to make sure that they only gave this resources to the brightest people in society because it cost so much to educate. But these days with internet, I'm a college dropout and I learn just about everything that I know through people I met on the internet or directly on the internet. And if it weren't for the internet, I wouldn't be educated. And one of the problems is that the same academic journals that used to be the sort of connection between the physicist and Oxford and the physicist and MIT, these institutions were extremely important in making sure that this network of education continued. These are the ones now that aren't allowing the professors to share their documents with people from the developing world that don't allow the student in India to read the physics journal without paying $18,000 in subscription fees. And those people who were the backbone of education are also becoming one of the main barriers to access. And we haven't been able to flip from this idea of managing scarcity through central control to managing abundance. We live in a world of abundance. The cost of collaboration, the cost of communication has gone down so much. But so much of our world is still designed around this idea of scarcity, trying to make things more efficient, trying to make more money, trying to grow. And the problem is when you live in a notion of scarcity in a world of abundance, you get things like obesity. You get things like this financial crisis. You get things that happen because people are so focused on goal-oriented happiness. And I think we talked a lot about happiness in the past, but really I think what I wanted to finally end on was that the key about sharing about all these other things, sharing is actually very natural when you sit and try to have happiness and have peace. Because it's much more interesting to have people read your work. If you're less focused on making money, less focused on becoming sort of the huge IPO and more focused on being happy, more focused on being loved, then you make the better decisions and how to survive in the world of abundance. And as an investor, I will tell you that the entrepreneurs who are focused on happiness and on process and agility are the ones who succeed. The ones who are focused on the IPO and the Porsche never make it. And again, this is a sort of Japanese end thing, but when you're sweeping the garden, when you see the whole thing, it seems like a huge thing. But if you focus on the process and you work, suddenly the whole world becomes much easier. And so I will say that we hear a lot about aspirations and people sort of going for this big goal, but I think that the key to success in this world of abundance is about sharing, is about peace, and about focusing much more on process and empowerment and less on control. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.