 Let's go ahead and move on to our next session, which is looking at the surprises that the Internet might yet hold in coming years, the Dragons Online. My name is Andres Martinez. I direct the Fellows Program at the New America Foundation. I'm the co-director of the Future Tense Program, this collaboration between New America and Arizona State University and Slate Magazine. Before I say anything else, I need to thank Bill Garrity, who's a New America director and a great all-around American. He pointed out to me as I was walking in that I had yogurt bridging my coat and tie. So the only reason it's still not there is thanks to Bill, so don't look too closely because there might still be some blotches. I'm here with Alan Davidson, who is the director of public policy for the Americas for Google and our host in the space, thank you. And Tim Wu, who's a Future Tense Fellow at New America, among other things, also a professor of law at Columbia University and the author of the recent Master Switch, The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, which I highly commend to you and is very relevant for our conversation here. Alan, I'd like to start off with you and, in a way, maybe give you a half apology for the manner in which this conference has sort of teed up the comparative look at synthetic biology and the Internet, and in a way we've kind of posited, particularly in our conversations yesterday, that synthetic biology is the new hot thing, that it's the sort of transformative technology that is accelerating at a faster rate, where all the excitement's going to come in the near future. Andrew Hessel, who gave our presentation yesterday, had one slide where he said, you know, SinBio is going to be the next it industry, and I thought that was, because he had been talking about how, you know, this is going to involve a different kind of code writing as kids, you know, can manipulate DNA and such, write their own code, and this is what kids are going to do in the garage, and the garage is in coming years, the true sort of brilliant geeks and information technologies are sort of passe. And I've read it, the slide is saying like the it technology, and it took me a second to realize he meant, you know, IT, and so. But again, the conversation was stipulating that, you know, the Internet is kind of slow, it's kind of mature, and you and I were talking a little bit yesterday on the side, and you felt like, well that might not be entirely fair, that in some ways the Internet itself and this IT space, that the rate of change is actually accelerating as opposed to the sort of what, the assumption that we had in our conversations that maybe it was a more mature industry. So if you could just sort of, you know, push back a little bit to what we had set up yesterday. Right. Well, first of all, let me just say thank you, and thanks to the organizers for doing this and for being here, and I wanted to apologize to all of you for the chairs. For those of you who were here yesterday, Professor Katch is still here. He's offered to road test some of the future chairs that we have here. They're rentals, but still. So yes, I work in an industry and for a company that in Washington is rarely accused of being mature. And just from kind of personal journey on this, I started working on Internet policy, though we don't really call it that so much in 1995 when I first came to Washington. And I have to say at the time, a lot of people thought it would be like a temporary gig, right? Like, kind of missed that one. But right, the feeling was like, hey, there's this new thing, the Internet, the web was becoming popular. Maybe this in the policy world would be like a step function, right? Like, we'd have this new thing, we'd develop a bunch of new laws, and then a couple years later, we'd all be working on energy or synthetic biology or something like that. And I think we completely got it wrong, right? I mean, what's been kind of most amazing is that the pace of change, especially in the policy space, has continued. And if anything is increasing, right? If we were having this conversation 15 years ago, we would have missed a lot of the key technologies. And we were having this conversation 15 years ago, we wouldn't be talking about broadband, we wouldn't be talking about Wi-Fi, we wouldn't be talking about mobile. If we were having it five years ago, we wouldn't have been talking about social networking, we wouldn't have been talking about Twitter, we wouldn't be talking about apps or mobility, iPads, right? So the pace of change in the space has been incredible. And I would just say, I think this is an interesting thing people have written about it, right? So the amount of time between the introduction of a technology and its adoption by one quarter of the population has really increased in some key areas. I guess I was just looking at the automobile took 55 years to reach a quarter of the population, the telephone 35 years, television 26 years, the web less than six years, right? I don't know what the stat is on Facebook, but I'll bet it's less than that too, right? So we're seeing is this increasing pace of change and it raises, I think, huge challenges for policymakers here. This has been the theme of the conference, of course, but we are living it day to day. And it's a huge challenge. In introducing you, I meant to remark on your title, which is Director of Public Policy for the Americas. I always think it's cool when people have in their title, the Americas, it's sort of hemispheric, you know, you've got the whole hemisphere covered. And I was sort of, when I first saw that, I wondered, you know, how much time of balance, how much of balance time is taken up by, you know, Bolivia or war from Venezuela, but the question also is, you know, relevant to our conversation about governance. Because, you know, we, you know, we're talking about a network that obviously doesn't respect, you know, traditional nation state boundaries. And yet, it seems that for as much talk there is about American decline, in some aspects, it does feel like this is a space where, you know, a lot of the innovation, certainly in the technology side is coming from the states, but also a lot of maybe the ground rules for how society adapts to these technologies is driven by decisions taken here. But you have a better perspective on that and talk a little bit about your sense of the extent to which the, you know, the rules of this game are made in the US and then you encounter situations like Google didn't China. But how I was gonna say, you know, I think 15 years, 10 years ago, we easily made the case that the place to really focus your energy if you were interested in the space was in the United States. And specifically here in Washington. That's where a lot of the I would argue a lot of leading there was good stuff going on in Europe too. But I think a lot of the early thinking was happening here. The magazine or paper on e-commerce. A lot of the early, early battles that we were talking about, we heard about yesterday, the communications decency act, the legal challenges, they were happening here. I don't think you can make that argument anymore. And it is a global medium. And what we're seeing is global policymakers around the world getting involved. And I think what's happening in Europe, how it's looking at some of these issues and what's happening other places stuff we absolutely have to take into account and and think about as we're as we're doing this. Tim, I want you to comment on whether you feel the rate of change is accelerating or slowing down a bit. And then also at some point, I definitely want to ask you about the fact that the Egyptians did find a master switch for the internet this week. Sure. Thanks. It's great to thanks Alan for hosting us. And I was thinking a bit about this question as to whether in fact there is maturation of the internet. And the way I did this is I am a great connoisseur of the writings on the in the 1960s as to what the future will be like in information technology. I love them. I play them for my classes. I just think you can learn a lot. Because one thing that should be obvious is you can't invent something that no one has ever imagined. Right? That step has to happen first. And in fact, that's partially why I think you have all these science fiction writers here. Someone has to, again, you can't invent something that no one has thought of. It may sound like an obvious point, but it's true. And what's interesting is that most of the ideas that people have in the 60s in information technology, leaving aside the moving sidewalks and the rocket packs, most of the stuff in information technology actually has been invented. When you watch those old videos, their biggest idea, one of the big ideas, is there is this French video I watched where the woman was shopping for stuff online, and the man was paying for it. It was there, sort of. So the woman was doing online shopping, the man was doing online. This is a 60s video. Yeah, 60s video through a dedicated terminal. Other things. They didn't have the Minitel in France, pretty early on. They did. And that was the function of it. Other things were a big thing. Video phone was a big thing, if you look in the 1960s. 2001, Space Odyssey has people in sort of virtual film booths with video phone, bell, telephone still being there. But later on you have, I was thinking about Neil Stevenson's work, you have two of the things he talked about in his books. I don't know if he's still around or not. We're virtual reality, although better virtual reality than we have. And Data Havens, both of those to some extent exist right now, although they're not at the extent that he wrote about, but they exist. So I am wondering if actually we've reached the end of the first tank of gas with respect to the collective imagination. I'm interested in hearing about ideas that haven't been fulfilled, but it seems to me that actually, and even if you think about Star Trek and the, you know, it's basically cell phones that went between planets, we basically have that, the handheld communication devices. So it seems I think we may have run down the gas tank in our imagination a little bit. Because when I sit here, I have trouble, and if I'd been here in the 60s, I think I could have named 10 things that IT will do next or needs a new next. And most of them I think we've done. And so I'm curious as to what will be next. I think that it's not so much a failure of inventive power or resources, but perhaps we're running into limits of what our imagination was, particularly the imagination from the 1960s. Yeah, and I think there are two related, but somewhat separate questions about when we're talking about change and our how innovative society is. And one is on the technology side and the sort of the businesses and nobody could have predicted that, you know, the app model was going to sort of compete with the wide open web, something you've written a lot about. The importance of Facebook and some of these newer apps, you know, back in the mid 90s, I'm sure a lot of the discussion was simply about ISPs and how do you regulate the gatekeepers and dial up. But so there are two questions. One is, you know, we could talk about what's kind of how people are going to engage with the internet 10, 15 years from now if we're still calling it the internet. But then also there's this question of governance that, you know, we've been grappling with over the past day and a half. And the extent to which, you know, you feel both, and I want to hear from both of you on this, whether the way that we address these unexpected curveballs that technology throws us now, are we are we well situated in terms of current the sort of regulatory framework to adapt to the unexpected or do we have a situation where the way we govern the internet is too pegged to, you know, the what we have currently in place. Well, first you want to respond to what I had to say. Push back a little because I don't think the threat is played out. And maybe you'd say, well, it's about imagination, not development of technology. But, you know, there's some pretty deep trends that are we're still early in, you know, I mean, one of the big surprises I think is that, you know, Moore's law continues to be true, right? Like that computing power continues to increase very quickly. And it's not just that. I mean, it's what's happening with storage technology, right? I mean, I just priced that. So the entire Library of Congress printed works about 10 terabytes, right? A 10 terabyte hard drive. It's about $2,000. Now, right? I mean, not going to be too long where we could just ship you, you know, your your home computer is going to come with just every book, every written, ever written or every song ever sung on it and you pay to unlock it or something like we don't know where some of this is going, right? We've only got two billion people online. You know, what happens when five more billion people come online and they don't all speak English and they have they have a lot of other different needs. You know, I just think there are a lot of a lot of these trends that are still playing out and are going to lead to some very unexpected things. So I have that to sort of oppose myself, right? I mean, this is not one of these. Actually, I'm not talking about politics, so we can do whatever. But I one area I think I had the story hasn't played out agree with storage hasn't fully been played out. Global positioning, right? You know, geographical location hasn't been the person who invents either improves Foursquare or gets or invents the better version of Foursquare, the sort of Facebook to Foursquare as Friendster will will definitely. If you said I mean if you think of Foursquare as Friendster, which is good, but not quite right, something not quite perfect about it, whoever has that successor for whatever reason, I think is in a very good position just to sort of investment advice idea. But I think that's completely played out. But I do feel like when you look at the 1960s, I guess I'm repeating my point, there was a huge storage of things that people were knowing. And this is what I'm saying is a limit isn't that we've got lots of storage, incredible computing power, many minds, what we seem to have a little bit in shortage of is a full imagination of things that are to come. And in the 60s, there really was, you know, you picked up a comic book, I wasn't alive, but when I read the old materials, you look and there is like a huge, almost catalog, a serious catalog of the future. And I just don't see that to the same extent now, mostly because of the success of the inventors. So it's like all the resources are here, but they don't quite know where to go unless it's like the holodeck. But that's right, which you have over there. Yeah, I feel like there's less of a sense of where we need to go. Well, in the 60s, 70s, they had this, I mean, one thing the 60s, they said, I have this great idea, let's have a network that connects everybody, you know, and let's work towards that. And it was a, and let's put a man on the moon. And these, there was just a huge store of ideas. I don't really feel us having that as much. I mean, a great four square would be good, but it's a little less. But is it maybe the case that the ideas now are more siloed and balkanized and people, we have clusters of people thinking up and dreaming up different things. Whereas back then popular media and culture was so much more uniform. Everybody was watching the same TV shows and the same and reading the same stuff. And so maybe now it's harder to sort of aggregate what the big visions are. I don't know, that could be one possibility. And when you reviewed things in the 60s literature, and Neil Stevenson alluded to this earlier. I mean, I'm curious, Tim, if there were things that the conventional wisdom, the future is conventional wisdom back there, predicated we would have today that didn't pan out. Well, what they didn't get when you look at the 60s is their structural ideas were all wrong. They eventually assumed that Bell would do it all. And to 2001, a space odyssey, they walk into a Bell telephone booth. And so the idea was that it would be sort of these centralized monopolies that delivered all the benefits. And of course, many of the things from the 60s are videos made by AT&T about how eventually they're going to deliver a future 300 years from now or something. But and the other thing they don't guess in the old thing is the mobility. Everything is kind of these mobility or multi purpose machines. So they'll often have a little bit like Apple's vision. You'll have a thing on your desk, which is for buying stuff, you know, you'll have a viewer on your desk, which is reviving stuff. And you have something else, which is a telephone and something else, which is for email and something else, which is banking, they had that vision of information appliances. So they were wrong about many things. They imagined everything to be more vertically integrated and sort of more decentralized. Those are details. But the one thing they had in the 1670s was, as I said, like a Sears catalog, a clear set of visions as to where the future was. And there was a lot of people, you know, the whole internet movement was towards this, this idea. And I feel there's none, but I feel like it's hard to think of the same kind of unifying thing as like getting the man on the moon and connect everyone in a useful universal network. Well, and if the notion is like, Tim's going to set the bar very high for all of us, that's, that's great. I mean, you know, automated translation tools and cars, you know, that drive themselves and those kinds of things are, yeah. Okay, we've got a pretty close. Those are pretty close. I'll take it. You don't think a better four square analogous to going to the moon. Google maps and Google books are pretty cool. I'll give to to, I mean, especially if they really got done in a way, like finishing those projects is, you know, one of my colleagues in New America, Joel Garot always likes to talk in the office and about the fact that he's constantly thinking about the fact that Alan, you mentioned the incredible in durability of Moore's law. And yet, as Joel constantly talks about, it has, you know, the healthcare sector and the education sector sort of remain like the final frontiers where somehow Moore's law and a lot of this has yet to kick in. And sort of it's kind of this great question, particularly when we talk about the need as a society to lower healthcare costs, you know, at what point are those incredibly vital sectors of our economy going to become sort of part of the IT industry? Well, and I speak from the IT sector perspective, I think there is actually a lot of energy being spent now trying to think about how to apply some of these tools to these big societal problems, right? So if you look at what's happening with health IT and the incredible investment now in electronic health records, personal health records, trying to figure out if we can get some not just some cost savings, but some revolutions there in the energy space, right, with smart grid and the ability for you to have a lot more information and a lot more control over what's happening in your home, creation of new dynamic markets for energy. Those are going to be really interesting things. At the same time, I just worry a little about us looking for a silver bullet in IT for problems that actually are much bigger and much deeper. So, you know, it's going to be a mix back. If I do think on this theme of what hasn't been one of the big ideas that haven't when you think about science fiction particularly picking up the theme, it does tend to go not so much in the synthetic biology a little bit, but more towards the cyborg kind of stuff. The idea that all of our technology is our human extension and, you know, the stuff that Kevin Kelly talks about and the idea of basically a human augmentation is probably the thing. Actually, a lot of the early ideas on the Internet when you look at it, link to link litter. Link litter, the sort of grandfather of the Internet, JCR link litter, J.C. link litter who's an MIT professor had two really big ideas. One was that we should have a network that connects every computer together. And as he said in his original memo, it may have as many as four hard drives in his original and nine big machines. So that was his one big idea. His other big idea, and maybe the biggest, is he said, you know, we really need to think about computers as human augmentation. That the real function of computers isn't to be these devices that kind of do things themselves like R2D2 type machines, but are human augmentation. And to some degree, that's quite true. I mean, I've lost my memory because of Google and Bing, but mostly Google. Because I'm like, well, I don't need to know. And my mind just says, I don't even know those facts because they're findable. I've lost. Obviously, I can use Facebook to keep track of who's my friends. Google is my memory. Instead of using my hands to write things, I use word processors. Basically, I'm a, and we're all mostly here cyborgs of some kind. We've been augmented a bit by these technologies. Question is taking it into the next, I think the thing that hasn't been fulfilled and that Science Section has written about is taking that one more step further when you really begin to trust machines as part of you, as part of yourself in an almost slightly more integrated way. For example, if they have something where I can throw away all my keys and just put a chip in into my hand somewhere, I will be the first in line because I'm losing keys all the time. But I think perhaps it'll be the thing that hasn't happened that Science Section writes about is the level of integration. We're already quite integrated, but the level of integration is one step further when you start putting the machine inside the person. And also when we fix death. That's the other big thing that's in Science Fiction Books. You're just like. Let me ask you about another trend, which both of you pointed to when I said, hey, what should we be talking about on this panel? And you both said cloud computing as a sort of emerging trend that's going to revolutionize the internet. And I have no idea why you said that. So why should we be talking about cloud computing as potentially the next big thing and how it's going to affect the internet? Well, I think it's probably a big thing now. And I don't want to oversell it, but I think it is a bit of a change, a real revolution, actually, in terms of how computing is happening. And it's been going on for a while. This is the notion that people have access to, in small bursts, very large chunks of computing, processing power, storage. If you've used any kind of webmail program, email, hotmail, where your information is stored somewhere else on someone else's servers, you're using a cloud computing service. But search itself is, in many ways, a cloud computing service. And I think, again, we are just still beginning to play out this thread on what these services are going to bring and what's going to be possible. I mean, when you think about being able to give people huge amounts of computing power, I just saw a recent demo. We have this, on your cell phone, you can, we have voice search, right? So you can speak into your phone and it will do a search. We also have these great Google translation tools, right? Machine translation, where you can go to a webpage and have it automatically translated. Hopefully, people have used this. Just say, I hear that the State Department uses it, which always troubles me. But what's really interesting is now, people are starting to connect these things, for example, right? So very soon, you'll be in a place where we'll have a situation where you can go into, say, a hotel in Shanghai. The person behind the counter might speak in a language that you don't understand and speak into your phone. Your phone will translate that, turn that speech into text, translate the text into a language that you do understand, read it back to you in your Bluetooth earpiece and this will all be able to happen in real time. Suddenly, we are now into the tools indistinguishable from magic, right? We're into the 1960 science fiction where you can do this kind of, and this is going to happen, this is happening now. This is gonna be available soon. And so, this is what happens when you have, and it takes a lot to do that, right? There's a lot of computing power involved in each of those steps. But through this new architectural model of cloud computing, we're gonna be able to give it to people and give it to people just on a device that they carry in their pocket. And I think, so I say, we have only just begun to try to see what's coming from these tools. So, I'm not sure we're into maturity yet. No, I didn't say so either. Cloud computing is interesting because it is, and Alan knows as well, it's a phrase which sounds like it's moving forward, but of course, in design terms is borrowing the design principles in the 60s and 70s when mainframe computing dominated computing. Where the general idea was you would have a few giant centralized computers and people would have dumb terminals that connected to them. That's the basic model of cloud. It actually in some ways is the opposite of what the internet's idea was which was to decentralize power because it centralizes power. And there are a lot of advantages to those systems. Myself, I tend to think that things go in cycles and I wanna, I do think there was a lot of, basically the personal computer revolution began in the late 70s with a lot of people but among them Steve Weisenach whose great idea was, you know what, why don't we make the computer in people's houses really, really powerful? And that was the Apple too. A low-cost powerful computer in people's houses. Incredible idea. And the idea ultimately leads to the internet and a very 70s kind of idea like give people the power. That is a dominant model until basically this decade which has seen the re-rise of the centralized of the machine. Not that personal computers aren't powerful but the centralized machine becoming more powerful again. And I, in a sense the centralized machines were neglected because of how incredible the personal computer revolution was. So we've seen a catch up by centralized computers. I predict again that the personal stuff will pick up again in its time after cloud computing's had a little bit of a say and that's what I'm talking about with all these implants and becoming more robotic sort of stuff. And solving death, which I haven't explained yet. Oh, I'm not gonna get in the way of that, please. All the science fiction books, not all, but many of the science fiction books have this feature where you get either one of two things happen. One, you go let's say to a dangerous area and you become eaten by a dinosaur or fall off a cliff. That was a mistake. So you hit the reboot button and then like your backup comes or you go down a bad path. One of Cory Doctorow's books has this. Or a guy, he's living his life but he has a really bad relationship. He gets depressed, he falls in some with bad friends. Like his life is, he loses his friends then, I don't know, he's living in a basement and then he says, you know what, I'm gonna back up 20 years, it's reboot and out comes his clone with all like and then get re-programmed. Not quite there, but there is some logic to say that solving death might be something that people eventually get interested in. Death's kind of a drag. How do I follow up on that? No, I do, I do wanna, I wanted to say that whether or not, yeah, Washington, what's the regulatory framework for that? I can't even have to talk about regulation for a while. Nobody did, geez, everyone wants to talk about science fiction. No, but you know, whether we have a very decentralized view of the internet and the ways in which people access the IT universe and their digital lives or whether it's quite centralized, there is always going to be a few players who control a lot of the power. I mean, if it's decentralized, you still need the gatekeeper, whether it's your carrier or in the old days, your ISP. If it's all centralized, I mean, somebody is controlling that cloud computing power and the mainframe. And I wonder if, I mean, this kind of echoes some of the work that Rebecca McKinnon has done, another new American fellow, about sort of thinking about the consent of the network and the extent to which we have these new platforms that serve as sort of the public square that aren't necessarily public in the way that they used to be and we have different entities replacing sort of the sovereign. And it's not just about jurisdictional boundaries and the awkwardness of having these networks that don't respect old nation state lines, but it's also the fact that the ones who might control the master switch are transnational private entities. And there's been a lot of discussion in the aftermath of WikiLeaks about private companies deciding to unplug Julian Assange because they didn't want certain controversy. I don't know where I'm going with all this. I don't think it was a voluntary... Well, there was pressure and controversy and so people got squeamish. But to, again, to harken back to sort of the governance framework here, to what extent have we recognized this new reality that the sovereign isn't necessarily what we used to think of as the sovereign? Well, I'll start with that. Do you want to start with that? First of all, I wouldn't completely underestimate the sovereign as in the Hobbesian definition of the person or the entity with a monopoly on the use of force. I would not fully underestimate that figure. Yes, because obviously we just saw Egypt shut down the internet. Alan showed me this great graph yesterday of traffic and it goes... You can see it online. Yeah, it goes flat and search for Google traffic tool. It works on Bing also. Yeah, it goes... It's a great graph. Right. It does. It does in Bing. Well done. You're very, very... Alan has a master's diplomat. One thing we maintain is our essential physicality and the sovereign's power, unlike Google or Bing's power or anyone else, relies on this idea we're vulnerable to physical violence, which is actually not trivial thing. No matter who you are and how great your Facebook page is, you probably don't want to be beaten or put in prison. And that is the sovereign, the old sovereign's master tool, basically. So when it comes ultimately down to the sovereign against the internet, it's a tough question, but why did the people in Egypt agree to put the internet down? Well, they're not interested in being put in prison. And same when Google runs into serious trouble sometimes. Google's quite brave, I have to say. Much more brave than most of the IT companies. They're ultimately afraid of physical force. No, I'm not sure how interested your executives are in going to Italy with that judgment there. And so the sovereign, don't count the sovereign out because it has the oldest thing there is, which is a monopoly on brutality. And the internet has the ability to inform and educate, but that's a secondary power. Now, should we go to Italy? Our executives probably should. I think they actually can, but Google did run into trouble there with a court ruling that we are challenging and really disagree with about the question of whether we were liable for a video that somebody had created and placed on YouTube was awful and we took down very quickly. But these questions about liability and freedom online are still to be answered. And I think this central question about governance I think is still an open one and a difficult one. It's not just about the pace of change, it's about the choices we make. There was some discussion yesterday about some of the early laws in the internet space. I think we actually in the United States made some very good choices early on that I would argue are actually part of why we have such a thriving industry here in the internet space, because we did make some choices to really embrace the decentralized and open architecture of this end-to-end internet. And so we said we didn't wanna create gatekeepers. This section 230 that people were talking about yesterday is a bedrock principle for us, that the intermediaries, the ISPs, the hosters of content, are not liable for things that they didn't create, right? If you had made a different choice, you would have legally created a set of internet gatekeepers because the law would have demanded that we all police everything that happens on our networks, right? Similarly with the DMCA, which is the copyright equivalent of this intermediary liability. If we were liable for copyright violations that happen because users send something over a network or host a piece of content. As long as we follow the rules and taking it down under the proper circumstances, there shouldn't be liability. And I think this basic innovation-friendly approach that we've taken has been essential. And the hard governance challenge for us in some ways is now we really have to fight this globally, right? Because what's happening globally is important. These rules don't exist. And we're seeing a little bit of a backlash. The old conventional wisdom was you can't stop the internet, right? If you've got the internet, you've got freedom, it's inevitable, and there's nothing you can do about it. I think the new conventional wisdom, as we're seeing in Egypt and not just in Egypt and dozens of other countries, is actually we can try to control the internet, we can stop it. And now we have to go out and fight for these rules if we want the internet that I think we've come to know and look. Alan, in terms of responsiveness to technological change, do you think Washington is more innovation-friendly than it was in the mid-90s or less? How do you suggest it? Well, actually, so it's a really mixed bag, right? And I think there was definitely a certain, when you look at the debate over the Communications Decency Act, there was a certain Luddite approach on the part of Congress. We had literally the senator who sponsored this first internet pornography law. I very vividly remember him coming to the well of the Senate and saying, I don't know really the first thing about the internet. I've never used email, but I know that there's danger here and here's my bill to protect America's youth, right? And you don't really see people going to the floor of the Senate and saying, I don't know the first thing about healthcare, but here's my detailed healthcare bill, right? So I think we've moved on from that. Actually, I didn't see that. Wow. Sorry. I don't know. I think we have definitely matured and I think we've definitely, now for the first Congress where people are actually gonna be able to use their, we think blackberries and iPads on the floor of the house and that makes a big difference. I think there's been a generational change, but the average age of a congressman in this 111th Congress is 58 years old. We shouldn't expect them to be as deeply familiar with the details of all of these technologies, whether it's the internet or synthetic biology or any of these things. And they have to deal with a huge number of issues. They have a tremendous challenge. And so we do have a big governance problem, which is how do we create a cadre of policy makers who are, you know, kind of have dual competency and understand enough about technology and about policy to be able to make intelligent choices. And it's, I just say my evangelical mission, we need more people who can do that. Did you say the average age of a congressman is 108 years old? I said 58. Oh, 58. I thought it was. It would be 108. It would be true. Yeah, I would say, so we're on the regulatory environment, it's a great question whether things are better than the 90s. I definitely think things are better than 1930s. I did a lot of research into the history of regulatory responses to technology. And in the 90s, I'll say the greatest, one of the greatest traps for Washington in technology is something that sounds really attractive, which is strategic planning or generally planning. Often, a new technology will be invented or something. And I'll give you an example. In the 1930s, this man named Carl Jenkins, over here in Rocks, what's that? What's this over here? Rockford. Rockford, what's that? Oh, I forgot. On the other side of the river over there. Arlington. No, I forget it. Bad neighborhood. Anacostia. Over there. Not Rockville. I don't know what's wrong with my, I was actually born in DC. I just have lost my, just fucking Googles ruined my memory. You know, I'm in my 30s, and I'm in my 30s, I'm like an 80-year-old. I'm like, what was that? Is this somewhere I used to live in? OK, so anyway, the first radio, the first TV station in the United States was in Washington, DC, 1929. And very little known fact. 1929 is a lot earlier than most people may be thinking television started, because you think television in the 1940s. The FCC took a look at television and the new ideas for television, it was actually the FRC then. And they said, you know what? We need to deploy this in a planned, systematic, not like ad hoc fashion. And they got in the very, very extensive planning. And they didn't give, they never gave mechanical television, the early television, the right to develop commercially. It was always experimental. And consumers weren't ready, and things weren't happening. And their ideas sort of seemed nobles. They wanted to have it planned, released properly, deployed all at once, and had to be ready for the future. And that is, I think, when Washington really gets into trouble, is when they start trying to figure out what the future is going to be. And that was very much what they did with television, with FM, all this in the master switch, my book, FM radio, cable television. We're going to plan a better future. In the 1990s, I agree that it was sort of a golden age in some ways of trying not to plan anything and just see what happened. Sometimes I wonder if we're getting back to a sort of a planning idea. The broadband plan is obviously a big plan. I think there may be more of that instinct back towards planning. And I think that planning, while it sounds great, in fact, who doesn't want to plan, be prepared, is often a huge mistake in high tech uncertain markets. It's this tension between innovation and freewheeling culture and order, on the other hand. Obviously, I think both of you, from where you're coming from, respectively, would favor a less planned, more freewheeling culture of regulation. And I just wanted, before opening up to the audience, ask whether, particularly as the promise of IT hopefully starts kicking in in health care sector and education and other areas of life, whether you worry that the question of privacy might become a trigger for a backlash to the sort of freewheelingness and for a desire to have more order and for people to kind of step back. We're kind of, we constantly are being told that younger people don't have the same concerns about privacy that previous generations might have had. And that's sort of bantered about as some conventional wisdom. But I don't know if you worry that there might be forces that will try to kind of pick up the banner of privacy to demand a more orderly kind of march forward. I think I am one of those forces. I'm not the order leader of my privacy. I am the chinch of liberty. So it's not to say that there is no role for government in this space. I don't think either of us feel that way. And privacy and consumer protection, generally, is an area where we expect the sovereign to protect us. And we will see that. We have seen it. It happens now today. And it's very important. At the same time, I think there's another piece to privacy. It's not just the sort of consumer protection from the corporate world, but it's also about government's own activity in this space. And I think that is another area, the question of the rise of surveillance and the question of how we will limit and how we will update our laws to deal with these new technologies. So we're not creating a world where the technologies are really more of a force for control than they are a force for freedom. I think there is a role for government in figuring that out. At the same time, we need to recognize this is, we're sophisticated, this people is a complex system. There's going to be a role for government, but you also want to create it in a way that doesn't undermine these basic kind of architectural features that have been so helpful to making the internet a place where people can innovate, people can communicate, we can exchange ideas. So I would just say, it's going to be both. And privacy is going to be a touchstone and try to figure this out. But we are going to have government involved. We need to do it in ways that we should, two other thoughts, we should really do it in a way that recognize that the internet itself has come up with some really interesting ways to deal with these governance issues that aren't about government. So the internet itself was invented, the protocols were created by this IETF, this task force of engineers. They weren't governments. They don't even vote they hum. For those who've seen how this group operates, these sort of transnational bottom up self-organizing groups, whether it's the IETF or the W3C, ICANN doing domain name systems, the IGF forum for governments and civil society getting together to work things out, those are interesting tools, and we haven't figured out if we're going to be able to use them. The last thing I'd say is, through all of this, we need to be thinking about whether we're actually doing this for social good. And that's the bigger question that we've been asking the last two days. Any thoughts on privacy? Sure. To give governments credit though, Alan, they did fund most of the early internet research. And it was ARPA at the time that, with this guy, Linklinder in charge, who directed funding towards all these interesting radical scientists. And so it's not. So is privacy the force that might close the internet? I do, as I indicate in our initial mark, believe there is something of a maturation of internet technologies going on. I think, I kind of have to think this because I wrote in the master switch, I believe that technologies tend to go through these long cycles of 20 or 30 years, starting out very open, and ultimately going to a more consolidated or closed phase. And this will get to privacy in a second. And I believe that the internet is to some degree following the path of the radio, television, and the film industry, and somewhat others. Particularly in the sense that we're starting to see the emergence, I think, of a big three or a big four, like the auto industry. The auto industry in 1910 had hundreds, maybe hundreds of companies, and 20 years had three. I think you can see the emergence of three, four, five big internet companies, which are most of the internet as a possibility. Or you just sort of think not so much as the internet or the web, and you think of those five or six entities. They keep getting more, but I'm covering myself. One of them we're in the Washington office of. The question of what will drive that. I think privacy is one of the powers. If you look at history, I would suggest that the other ones are a demand for greater reliability. When I mean reliability, I just don't mean the thing not breaking, but a predictability of what you're going to get. Google is great advantage over the world of 10 search engines in the 90s is you kind of get a sense of, once you use Google a lot, you kind of have a sense of what it's going to do, that it will usually return a result in a fast time. It just has this, it becomes a tool, and people are really, I think, even more powerful in people's interest in privacy, is particularly Americans' interests in reliability and convenience. Having things work the way you expect them to is an extremely powerful social force. Also, some of the interest of industries that want to protect their intellectual property. It's been a factor since the beginning, but I think has, in sort of decisive ways, begin to affect the internet. And I guess, lastly, a desire for some level of curation has always been, it's not what the internet's supposed to be about, but nonetheless is there, and Hollywood Studios in the 30s, NBC in the 30s, they always offered people something. They're like, the past is too crazy. This medium is too weird, and too much is going on. We're gonna offer you a quality product. You come here, you get it. And I think that is beginning to affect the internet as well, particularly in the fortunes of another company known as Apple. That here you are, here's the best stuff, don't bother with the rest. I think that factor, along with privacy and other things, is beginning to close the internet. Yeah, and I'll be curious to see how this issue of privacy relates. I mean, I think it overlaps a bit with the desire for curation and reliability, if you understand that term very broadly. I mean, I think we shouldn't underestimate the power of things like teenage suicides due to hazing, and how that can affect cultural views of the internet, and the fact that it's not all positive. This openness. Let's open it up to the audience. And I was sitting in the back, so I don't wanna penalize people who are sitting in the back to have solidarity for the back of the room. So back in the woman in the red, and please identify yourself. Hi, I'm Maria Farrell. I used to work at ICANN, and now I'm at the World Bank, bit of a sucker for punishment. In terms of the open architecture, the NDA network that you were talking about, Alan, I mean, I see these as global public goods, and they're the innovation that gave us the internet that we have. But when I look at how things are developing, the people who are interested in the open architecture philosophically lined up against governments, telcos, IP rights, and Google has been a great champion of the open architecture. But in terms of China, our net neutrality, you guys go so far, but you can't really, or don't really go any further. So tactically, philosophically, I guess I'm asking, where do you think people who support and believe in the open architecture of the internet, what should they be doing, and how should they be acting? I think you've summed it up well, which is I think they need to be vigilant and involved. The fact is that we do have these very big choices still ahead of us about what kind of internet we're going to have, especially as more people come online, especially as the debate moves out of the United States and Europe, where there's been a, you know, I think a cultural and, you know, kind of societal set of norms that have played into how we look at those problems, right? We like openness, we like freedom, and we've tried to create a network that reflects that. But those, you've laid it out, those are the challenges I think at Google, we have tried that our industry, I think has tried to, a lot of people in our industry have tried to embrace openness, open source, the end to end architecture of the network, the freedom that we need, not just, and this is one area where we really need government's help pushing back on other governments to keep the free flow of information. So it's engagement, we need engagement. Alan's right and kind of say, there is a history which suggests, I'll just very quick, that open mediums tend to close to keep, the internet open requires not just sitting around, but a certain vigilance, and I completely agree with Alan. Read Tim's book. Yes, if you do nothing else, read Tim's book. In the back corner, wait for the mic. Hi, it's Stumler. Arguably one of the failed unachieved ambitions of the 1960s was artificial intelligence and the Turing test. Would you argue perhaps that singularity will be the unachieved ambition of the 2010s? Oh boy, I knew singularly was going to be mentioned at some point. You know, I, who am I to know, but I think that artificial intelligence, I think Lick Litter nailed it when he said, he said that it was, that human augmentation was more important than artificial intelligence. His point, he was responding to the artificial intelligence arguments in the 60s when he said, we don't need to invent new brains, we need to improve ours with his argument. We need to see computers as stretching our capacities. One of the things I'll mention that's really interesting is the early internet and computing laboratories saw their mission is very similar to the laboratories that were experimenting with LSD as another kind of brain augmentation. There was like, and this is in the early 60s when people were just, well, like their chemists and more computer scientists and we're both working on stuff that's gonna make the brain like augmented and they're working on perception and we're working on computational power. Now I'm not suggesting that, I don't know what I'm suggesting, but I just think that I think that is not done, that the project of, and I think Lick Litter was right that AI is much harder than human augmentation to go back to that debate. I'm in the second row here. Mike Nelson with Georgetown University and also with the CSC leading edge forum. For the first time ever in my tweeting, I was tempted to put several large curse words in my tweet when you said that we are running out of imagination. You took it back halfway, but I can't believe that you're reading the same blogs I am. We're gonna move from a world with two billion users online to a world with a trillion sensors. That's a fundamental difference, but I think I'd like to ask you a question and Alan, what I think the fundamental question about this new age of ubiquitous, everything linked to computing really comes down to is will we have the truly universal everything connected world or will my car be on one network, my sprinkler system being on another, light bulbs in this room on somebody else's network, how can we push it all together and really create this universal, smarter planet, whatever you want to call it? I guess IPv6 is the answer, right? But the- That's the free records. Well, let me clarify my earlier remarks. I'm just challenging people to remember that the stuff that science fiction writers does and the imagination part is really, really important, even though it seems hard and sometimes, it's not enough, I was trying to say, just to have all the computing resources, everyone online, you have to have a vision and you have to have imagination. We have to work on the almost demand side of our equation. What are we having all these resources for? What can we imagine it be? And I think the 60s were a very rich time for that. And 60s and 70s were very rich for deep imagination of what a utopian or future could be like. And I don't say we got nothing now, but I think sometimes now we're so focused on the means we're forgetting the ends. And can I just say, I think it'll be one network because I think we're too used to it and too spoiled and we see how awesome that is. But I think the key question is gonna be how do we do this in a way that people are gonna feel comfortable with, where we have the protections that people need to protect their privacy. I think our whole industry spends a lot of time thinking about how do you deploy these kinds of things in the field in ways that they're actually gonna make people's lives better, right? This is the means versus ends question. And I think that is where we have a lot of research to do is how to live in that new world. Okay, I wanna take a series of questions and then you can respond to them quickly, but just let's gather some questions over here. Yeah, my name is Doug Gage. I'd like to follow up on that last question. It seems to me that, I'd just like to get you to comment on this abstraction of the development of the internet. First, there's mechanisms for connectivity, hardware versus software, wired and wireless. So then you add on information utilities, which is new kinds of stuff that has been grown onto and applied to the connectivity mechanisms. And the real blossoming of this was originally email, but then the web and then social networks and stuff. And now we're in the phase where what we're doing is we're leafing out the network by, but through connectivity, adding on existing stuff in three ways. Smart things, your car, your refrigerator and your self-finding key because it has an RFID in it. Smart places, ubiquitous cameras, maps, find your Starbucks, eventually, self-guiding museums, historical sites. And then finally, smart people, Cyborg, the Cyborg ID, cognitive prosthetics, life log, that kind of stuff. Just comment on that. Also here in the front. Let's read the time limits. Thank you. My name is Laura Lakelli. I'm with the new Strategic Security Initiative. I have a question about governance. I'm doing a project on the Hill right now talking to staff about how they're filtering information and what's influential. And basically there are not a lot of filters and what they have is a lot of noise. And that the human aspect of this, the human filters they have are suspect because many of them are captured by commercial interests and private interests. And I think one of the things that going to these tech conferences there's a lack of institutional empathy in general and that one thing that's true in politics of anybody who's worked in Congress is that at the end of the day the relationships are gonna leverage the technology. The technology is not going to leverage the relationships. And that instead of focusing on government, we need to focus on governance which is much more distributed rulemaking. And it's gonna happen outside of Washington, D.C. and it's gonna be based on credibility and trust which are things again that technology can facilitate but never replace. And I'm wondering, is there that level of empathy among your peers in the tech world? Cause I see sort of hints at it. Are you saying I have a flat effect? No, no, I love you. Thank you. But could you comment on that? Cause I feel like if this doesn't add to social value and help us recapture our public space for citizens and the public, then what's it all for? Okay, let's take one more. And in the back, in the black. Yeah, I'm sorry, right here, this one. I'm Ellie Graydon from Griffin Scientific. And I was wondering in terms of the dream, this perception that the dreams are no longer out there or that we've emptied that tank, I'm wondering if they're simply being differently held. If the parties that are holding those are now small startups and they're more diffuse than AT&T and also more concerned about loss of their intellectual property rights and therefore those ideas are being held in a proprietary fashion and aren't being published until there's a sense that those companies can benefit from them. So I'm wondering is that a way in which we can regulate or in a way that in which governance can start to tackle these issues and start to tackle the emerging technologies is actually through IP or if that's a, how you then go about addressing those coming technologies. Okay, we have great questions and we have about a minute. So Alan, do you have any empathy? Do you want to start with that one? I have empathy. So yes, I think a couple of quick responses. I do think we're, I think the industry is very sensitive to this or this community is very sensitive to the notion that there are other forms and other places, other methods besides just government to do this. I will say there's also the challenge in government which you've recognized. I used to work at a place called the Office of Technology Assessment which now doesn't exist anymore. And the lack of those institutions here that are trusted and can be trusted to give good advice. And I say this as somebody who is a partisan and a player in this space. We need more of that and that would be very useful. I think we're not gonna be apologetic about Tim losing his memory. I'm hoping that we've actually made him smarter along the way but the key for all this is going to be about trying to make sure that we're doing it in a way that is focused on a societal end that we like whether it's promoting human welfare. To this question I think to promote innovation I think we should be looking at and continuing to embrace an internet that is friendly to innovation that's decentralized where there are fewer gatekeepers. That innovation friendly open internet should be a thing that is a goal of our policy making. I guess my closing comment, I don't know if I have time to address the comments is just to say we need more science fiction writers in a sense and more people who are thinking. No, I mean it. I think that. I think Bruce Sterling doesn't want the competition. Let's say. No, I whether they don't even have to be novelists or they don't have to even write like fiction. They just have to be in this thing and we do have it but we need to remember that the limits of what we can do are limited by our imagination. And I don't really think we're actually like we're not less imaginative than 40 years ago but I think we have the danger of becoming obsessed as I said with the means, with bigger, with faster and losing sight of the ends or not having a clear goal of what we really want out of all of this and that's all I have said. Great, well I'm smiling and happy inside because I think I saw a stealer cap in the back there. So go stealers and also because we've had an hour on governance of the internet and the term net neutrality did not come up. Yeah, so thanks to a great panel. Thank you both.