 Technology has always been a controversy within humanity. Throughout history people have championed and opposed each major milestone in technical advancement. Now as the delta increases, so too will the impact of our emerging technologies. While many of these effects will be positive, there will also be negative consequences and repercussions left unexamined. What you're about to hear is a pair of talks on the unintended consequences of technology. And how to guard against them, followed by a diverse panel exploring the controversial potential of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. The first of these will be given by David Temkin, a product development leader and entrepreneur with a history of developing and commercializing beautifully designed products used by millions of people. He is currently the Chief Product Officer at Brave Software, and the focus of David's talk will be on data privacy and a healthy news economy. David is by nature a skeptic, but recent public outcry over breaches, along with technological advances such as blockchain, give him a sliver of hope that we could live in a world where you're not being data-mined 24-7. And that you are able to participate in a news ecosystem in which people are able to produce legitimate journalism for fair pay. Well, let's hear it from him. Please welcome to the stage David Temkin. Thank you. All right. Okay. Hey there. Let's see if this works. I'm not seeing it. Got it. I'm here to talk about how we consume news on the Internet, how we got to the very toxic place that we're in, and what is broken in the content economy, not just for the people reading the news, but also the starvation of revenue for the people who are creating news. And so I'd like to paint a picture. I'm going to start with what did things look like 20 years ago when the Internet kind of emerged on the scene? I do see some gray hair here, not a lot. Some of you probably remember that here and there. There was a time not that long ago we had, you know, three TV networks, a handful of stuff on cable, a handful of newspapers. That's how everyone got their information. And when the Internet finally did emerge in the mid-90s to the late-90s, what we had was, well, look, everyone's very excited. It was a medium design for publishing. Pretty much anybody with sufficient effort could put up their own publication and nearly anybody anywhere could consume that content. This was mind-blowing. If you lived through that, that was a completely mind-blowing idea. And it was very simple and it worked very well. And you know, you could think of that as like just a leveler. Everybody can participate in the conversation. Everybody can get their word out. Everybody can say something. All right. Now, as this kind of, that kind of, hey, it's mind-blowing. It's really amazing. This is going to be a world-changer. Now, look, from the point of view of fake news, the election of 2016, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, these sentiments seem utterly alien. But this is what people were saying at the time. We're going to open up an entire new world of ideas and discourse. We're going to have a golden age of journalism and all kinds of new ideas and a new world is at hand. And we'll all be neighbors in a global village. And you would even hear people talking about political differences are going to kind of fade as people kind of, you know, they express themselves, everyone gets to read everyone. And this is genuinely what people were thinking. There was also the money craziness side of this. So there were all sorts of sites popping up on the internet, many of them content sites. I've got three of them up on the screen right here. This is what Yahoo looked like back in the day and Yahoo was, you know, a big deal back then. And two very early internet-native content offerings. Everyone was very excited about them, 1999 or so. Salon and slate, both of which still exist now, which in its own way is fairly amazing. But this kind of tells the story. You're looking at a screen capture of Salon from 1999. Oh, okay. Salon.com IPO, right. Okay, they probably had about 25 users, no revenue model, no plan for growth. That was the situation back then. Everything go, go, go. The future is all green, everything else. Now, let's fast-note, so that's great. The only issue with this, and I'm going to outline how this is played out, you know, 20 years later. It's kind of a fly in the ointment here. Namely, waiting. It's all going to be supported by advertising. This entire new world was going to be supported by advertising entirely. And it's not that the advertising is such a horrible thing in and of itself. It may be annoying. What's really, you got to get to the bottom of this. So one of the effects of this is you can't pay for content. All right? That means it's all going to be driven off advertising. And ultimately, advertising in the internet era is all driven off data. So let's kind of look at the three parties here. You look two decades later. Who's winning? You go to a web page for a given news site. The parties that you think are involved are me, the reader, the content creator or a publisher, and the advertiser. Those are the parties that are visibly involved. Well, all three of them are losing, have lost under this arrangement. Big deal. As you browse the web and you read site to site to site, your personal information is being leaked out to parties that you don't know about and are not evident on the screen. And this is a very strange phenomena. You also get a very slow experience with the ads and the downloads and it cuts into your data plan. The content creators, despite all this advertising, are also losing. They don't make any money anymore. It's virtually impossible to be a journalist and to create high quality content. That takes real effort and there's very little money in it anymore. And very strangely, the advertisers are also losing because this entire system is riddled with fraud. Advertisers are paying for advertisements that are not shown to human beings. Okay, so those three parties, they're all losing. Well, who's winning? We have these centralized platforms that are not themselves publishers, they're not themselves advertisers, they're not themselves, obviously not readers. Two companies control 87% of the digital advertising market, which could almost be summed up as 87% of the advertising market. At least that's the trend line. We also have this thing, again, invisible, ad technology behind the scenes, kind of taking your information, oh, we think you're interested in this, pushing it around, getting out to other people, so you can get more relevant ads. If you were to browse, here's a scenario. I go browse to thedailybugle.com. The Daily Bugle is going to show a few advertisements that you might think it's kind of like you're reading Vanity Fair and some advertiser paid Vanity Fair to run an advertisement. It's actually nothing like that. The Daily Bugle, you're running in a web browser, that browser knows I was at this set of sites. I've made this set of search terms. It knows maybe you're looking for a car, maybe you're a male age 25 to 49, maybe you're into LGBT issues. All of these things can be inferred from your browsing behavior. Great. You go to that site. That site says, I want some ads. It talks to ad exchanges. It passes your information out there. It says, okay, I've got a reader that looks like this. Can we serve that person these bits of information? The ad exchanges talk to other entities, each of these potentially different corporate entities. Your information, your browsing history and things like that are being derived, being sent out to all of these different sites. Look at how many entities are involved in that transaction. In terms of what it takes for a single advertisement to land on the Daily Bugle, they're getting the crumbs at the end of it. They're not getting the lion's share of this revenue. Daily Bugle is being starved. Not a good situation. Not particularly ethical. Not good for readers. Certainly not good for quality content. You can't make money in this market. It's totally broken. So I work for a company called Brave Software. We have a web browser. First and foremost, it's oriented around privacy. So one thing we did was, all right, let's just make it impossible for these third parties to track you. The parties other than the site that you're reading. The Daily Bugle, yeah, it knows. You know you're looking at it. Great. All those invisible parties, let's make that impossible. Okay, wonderful. That means you're not getting any advertising and zero revenue flows to the content creators. So that's not adequate. We want something that actually kind of rebases this system on a more equitable basis. We created a system using cryptocurrency, Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency. And it has a couple of very interesting attributes here. First of all, why would you do cryptocurrency in the first place? Not simply so, hey, I can say I'm doing cryptocurrency. Payment on the web is a weird thing. Right now, you've got to typically register with a credit card. You've got to provide all your information. And the charges that you make cannot be tiny. They're not going to be like five cents here and five cents there. So cryptocurrency changes that. You can have anonymous transactions and you can have very small and very frequent transactions as well. Our system starts with, okay, an advertiser is fundamentally paying to get access to a user's attention. Well, then let's pay the user for that. When you use Brave and you opt in to this advertising system, among other things, you will get payments up to 70% of the revenue that's being put into the ads flow to you. Okay, that's good. That helps you. That still doesn't help the content creator. The third leg of this stool is that if this system is working in its default manner, what happens is as you view ads, you are accumulating cryptocurrency and as you browse from site to site, you are remitting tiny bits of cryptocurrency in proportion to the time that you spend visiting those sites. It's almost a passive automatic activity. Your personal information never leaves your machine. I'll talk a little more about that. Now, let me show you what, if I browse to TMZ in a normal browser, I'm using Google Chrome. I go to TMZ.com. On the left, you will see all of the servers and all of the entities that receive your personal information as you do that. There are over 100 of them there. When you do the same thing in Brave because we're blocking all of this traffic, it only touches the actual entity's domains that are owned and controlled by TMZ. Very different scenario. When I talk about the cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency is sort of an infinitely deep topic and difficult to get into all the micro details of it. The fundamental point here is it is a great match for the problem we're trying to solve. We want people to be able to browse the web, not worry about their personal information going somewhere, enable the users being paid, micropayments, and the sites being paid in micropayments. Anonymity is critical. Recording it on the blockchain, that's kind of about how do you eliminate advertising fraud. That's the last piece of this. I'll talk about one important thing here in terms of we are very much about respecting the user's autonomy and data and privacy. How can you possibly target advertising at a given user if their information never leaves the browser? The answer is, unlike today's advertising systems where, as you saw in the earlier slides, the information goes out and it just gets pushed to the cloud and you've got 74 different cloud providers with your personal information. What happens here is the browser itself constructs a local profile of what you're interested in and what it thinks you're all about. That profile never leaves your browser. Your browser then goes up and says, give me all of the possible advertisements. Might be lists of thousands of them. And then it says, based on what I know about you, I am going to select which ad to show you. So in that way, you are getting very relevant advertising, but your own information is not being filtered out to third parties that you have no relationship with. So we keep the personal information entirely on the device. With regard to the content creators, we've designed the system so that if the user doesn't fiddle with all the settings, the content creators will be paid automatically as the user browses from site to site. Little bits of cryptocurrency will flow to those content creators. We've also just added kind of a tipping system if you want to actually say, hey, I want to tip you with some payment right here and now. There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the problem that we aim to solve here with the system. Just to give you kind of a visual on what does this thing look like. As I said, it's a web browser, and this is a picture of that browser running on the desktop. We've got it on the major mobile platforms as well as the major desktop platforms. I'm looking at a YouTube channel. I click on the upper right to hit the so-called Brave Rewards feature. It asks me, do you want to participate in this? Okay, sure. Sounds good. At that point, we get you started with a little bit of free cryptocurrency. All good. And then some fancy slide effect there. And you've got some amount of cryptocurrency that you can then distribute to your favorite content creators. And it's kind of an adjunct to your browsing. It's not really in your face. It lives in the web browser. It doesn't interfere with the sites that you're looking at. In the big picture here, this is a very complicated problem. What my company is doing is approaching one particular angle of it. This is about kind of the personal information privacy and the validity of the content economy question. How do you have a healthy content economy? There are other questions. Who can be monetized on a central platform? How do the central platforms control who has a voice and who doesn't? Those are very interesting topics. But from our point of view, if you look at this in the broad strokes, again, looking back at, we'll start with the 90s, it was very centralized. We had a small number of entities who controlled the news and controlled what could be put out there. The 2000s, you saw this kind of loosen up with blogging and self-publishing and the like. But with the advent of big data, machine learning, and these giant kind of captive platforms, whether it's YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. That really changed things. We entered a period of re-centralization. It's our hope at Brave that the blockchain and particularly, look, these things are generating a lot of publicity and a lot of outrage right now. And rightfully so. That the blockchain combined with increased public awareness can shift things so that as we move into a new decade, we're going to kind of rebalance it into something that's more equitable and more level and less exploitative. And that is about the size of it. Thank you.