 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today here in person as well as on the web. My name is Benjamin Lennett, and I direct the policy team here at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative. Let me just say a brief words about New America before we get started, and then I'll turn it over to Daniel to introduce the event. New America is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States. We have programs that work on a range of pressing public policy issues, including national security, education, health care, and economic growth. My program, the Open Technology Initiative, formulates policy reforms to support open networks and open source innovations. We promote universal and affordable communications access through partnerships with communities, researchers, industry, and public interest groups. And we are committed to maximizing the potential of innovative open technologies, particularly for poor, rural, and other underserved constituencies. At OTI, we very much share the goal of the 550 Challenge to realize the promise of the Internet as a basis for our communications renaissance, and to ensure that no matter who you are or where you are in the world, you can access an open Internet that empowers free speech, free expression, creativity, and access to information. It should be a great discussion this afternoon. We have a tremendous panel of speakers. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Daniel to get us started. Okay. Thanks, Ben. So my name's Daniel Berninger. I'm a communication architect based in D.C. And the idea with the 550 Challenge is essentially a reaction to just observations over the years that the Internet as the Internet advocacy is coming off of what's considered one of the bigger victories in terms of pushing back on legislation, the SOPA and the PIPA. But if you look at, you know, the debates as they've played out, for the most part, the Internet advocacy has been reacting to someone else's agenda. And so it's kind of hard to, you know, transform the world and make all the good things that happen for the Internet when you're just essentially reacting to bad ideas that other people have. And so the 550 Challenge is in and of itself is not a standalone initiative. It's meant to be a common goal, a shared destination for all the existing initiatives. And so, you know, we'll essentially pull people together, create, you know, communication groups, common distributions, common Twitter feeds. In other words, we use all the Internet's capabilities to unite and coordinate towards connecting everyone on Earth over the next six years to the Internet. So in general, I mean, so the Internet, John Perry Barlow, who's in the sky for our session here, I guess he got on the Internet or the precursors to it back in 1986. 1985. 1985. And he worked pretty hard to, I think maybe he'll tell us some of that story, but it was pretty hard to get on the Internet in those days. I was working at Bell Laboratories in the 90s, and so I'd had access to the Internet around 1991. And then come around 1996, when the Telecom Act of 1996 was ratified or, you know, signed in the Library of Congress, there was about 36 million people on the Internet. So now, depending on who you ask, we're up to about 2 billion. And you know, everybody's always known there's something special about the Internet, and we haven't really always been great at articulating on what it might be that's special and what needs to be protected. And I think one of the framings that I'm coming around to is that what the Internet does is essentially resets the rules of engagement between people on Earth, in the sense that normally I'll, you know, engage with my neighbors or I'll engage with people in other countries filtered through the fact that I'm an American citizen and they may be a French citizen. But the Internet really gives you kind of a direct human-to-human ability to interact, and it's really that direct capability that, you know, we want to protect. And again, there's a lot of people working, advocating Internet issues, and the sense of passion that people have seems very similar to, you know, patriotism that, you know, people have for their countries. But again, it's hard to know, you know, well, is that patriotism to cyberspace and, you know, where are the limits for sovereignty and how does the cyberspace sovereignty relate to physical sovereignty? And so these are all issues that we need to figure out as we move forward. And I've pulled together a gracious esteemed panel here to essentially ask these questions and think about them. I don't think we'll necessarily have tons of answers today. This is essentially a starting point and to think about what types of questions are important to answer. Now, as far as the challenge itself, assuming you think it's a good idea to connect everyone in the world to the Internet, and not everybody necessarily would, you essentially have three challenges. One, you have a physical challenge of getting everyone connected. And given that we haven't been able to provide, you know, clean drinking water or protect people from conflicts all around the world or survival of, you know, safety in shelter, et cetera, you know, there's plenty of physical challenges to make that happen. And then there's sort of political challenges. Again, the issues that John Perry Barlow has been working on for 20 years, and he's just about to solve, I'm sure, about sovereignty. And what does it mean? The relationship between the virtual and the physical. And then let's say you figure that out, and then there's sort of the value proposition of the Internet itself. What is the sort of the social issue? So in the United States, we have Internet access reaching about 90% of the population, but only 65% actually connect. And so why is that? Why isn't the value proposition of the Internet adequate to get everyone connected? And so there's issues about that, or maybe it's too expensive, or the value proposition isn't sufficient. And so these are all issues that we need to figure out. And in the end, you also, in terms of implementing a sort of new mode of thinking about civilization, you need to deal with the darker sides of human nature in the sense that, you know, if we were in heaven, you wouldn't need a bunch of rules in terms to protect each other, you know, protect us from each other. But on the Internet, you do, I mean, you just kind of have to look at your spam folder to kind of really be a little frightened about what's out there on the Internet. And so again, these are all things, issues that we need to navigate on the way forward. So John, would you go ahead and have you just get us started kind of framing out your journey. And again, when you posted the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in 96, there was only about 36 million people on the Internet. I mean, do you still think we need a Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace? Well, you know, one point of clarification, when I wrote that, and the next time I write a manifesto that's going to become a global watchword, I'm going to make sure that I don't just think I'm sending something to my friends where I'm imitating the high-falutin style of somebody who's been dead for a couple hundred years. It ended up being a little over the top in its style. But I don't think that what I said in that was fundamentally wrong. I wasn't declaring independence in the same way that, say, the United States declared independence from England. What I felt that I was doing was stating a fact, which was that it was probably not going to be possible for the existing nation-states to exert sovereignty over this borderless realm, and that most efforts to do so would end in mischief and harm to the great work that we were all engaged in creating in finding a unified space for humans to inhabit. It's become popular to debunk that based on the fact that, of course, there is localized censorship, whether it's the sort that China imposes, and I think that the Chinese censorship as Rebecca can discuss is much more nuanced and in some ways ineffective than it is regarded to be on this side of the Pacific. But there's also the fact that, for example, Google has to protect the people of Thailand against bad material about their king as a precondition of having a business in Thailand. They have to protect the people of Turkey from ill-dated words about Kamal Ataturk as a condition of having a business in Turkey. There are all these local variations that are possible to exert some authority over. On the other hand, I would say that it's the case that anybody in Turkey who wants to go to websites that are critical of Kamal Ataturk can find them. As is true with many things, what's happened is a both-and. There is the exertion of sovereignty by parts of the physical world over the internet, and yet at the same time it is in its very nature anti-sovereign. There is a declaration of property over many of the things on the internet, and this we will go into at much greater length. I don't think that property naturally adheres to anything that isn't made out of atoms. Trying to deal with expression in the fruits of thought as though they were no different from the toaster is going to get us into a lot of trouble and already is. There are jurisdictional problems where practically everything is overextending itself. If I had an interesting conversation last night in public with the human rights ambassadors of the United Nations who were being dressed by the deputy secretary for Homeland Security, Jane Lute. I asked her what were the boundaries of the United States of America as she understood them these days. Since just before Thanksgiving, the Department of Homeland Security had shut down over 70 websites, most of them foreign, because there was supposedly copyrighted material on these websites. There was no process by which they were warned or which they could appeal. They just simply had their names removed from the DNS table that was being maintained by an American registrar. That was all the jurisdiction that Homeland Security needed apparently. She actually refused to answer the question in the particularly, because she said there were ongoing cases, but then refused to answer it in any way in the general, which I found a little alarming. I think that this has been generally the case. As far back as the 90s, I can remember being in the White House and arguing with them about cryptography and saying what for the purposes of this discussion are the borders of the United States, because we were talking about exporting strong cryptography out of the borders of the United States. One of them said we don't find that that's a very useful question to ask around here. It's a useful question to start asking. I think my perspective over this long period of time is that it becomes a critical question to ask. The other question we have to ask is if we cannot endow imposed rights by law, and if we cannot endow laws that will protect us, how do we govern cyberspace? This is still a completely open question, and I hope we can take that up today. Okay, great. Let me bring in Rebecca McKinnon. Now, Rebecca, you've named your book Consent of the Networked. Is there a story behind that? I mean, it seems to be the last people that sort of invented that the consent of the governed, they went off and created a country. I mean, can you give some background on that? The point of the book actually deals a great deal with some of the problems that Barlow just described, which is that democracy and sort of the notion of consent of the governed was a political innovation that we evolved as a society from assuming that the divine right of kings was the only way to organize power and governance, and eventually evolved to the notion that government is illegitimate without consent of the governed. But that notion and the way it's been implemented has been organized around nation states with national borders, and Barlow, I think, very clearly outlined how that doesn't work very well, sort of the construct of sovereignty and state power, which there's a reason we have government, which is that you need to organize society, you need to deal with security and crime issues and so on, and there's a reason why we have government in physical spaces, but the way in which we hold government accountable, and the way in which we constrain the abuse of power in a physical democracy, or at least the way, you know, ideally the way it's supposed to work at least, obviously, in practice, there are always problems and issues, but, you know, at least in the physical world we have a basic kind of model for how you constrain the abuse of power, how you kind of balance out different interests, and how you construct, at least ideally, a system that's based on consent of the governed that at least, you know, has some hope of working. But in a digitally interconnected world, when you overlay cyberspace across, you know, the nation state, it doesn't map very well, and so you get the problems like, you know, Barlow describes that the United States, you know, the United States Congress, you know, almost, you know, came very close to passing a law on copyright protection based on, you know, at least what some constituencies in this country wanted passed, but it was going to affect people all over the world who use the Internet, who have no way of holding accountable the people passing that law, and unfortunately, at least American Internet users kind of stepped up and said, hey, wait a minute, this doesn't work for us either, we kind of do not consent to this law, and we stopped it, but if it had been the kind of situation where the American people had not stopped it, or had actually consented to it, thought it was a good idea for, we're convinced it was a good idea for some reason, but it was negatively affecting everybody else in the world, you know, too bad, right? So that's a mismatch of kind of jurisdiction and sovereignty that's very troubling because it lacks global legitimacy for, you know, the bulk of Internet, or for most Internet users on the planet who did not vote for anybody in our government. So that's kind of one mismatch. The other issue just has to do with the fact that of course the Internet is made up of, you know, a lot of commercial services, a lot of online communities, all kinds of different platforms, service providers, et cetera, et cetera, and so you have, you know, Facebook just IPO'd, so, you know, just to use the Facebook analogy, Facebook has created this and you're called Facebookistan. Yeah, Facebookistan, the kingdom of Facebookistan, you know, Facebook is this, you know, this international community of Facebook users and you could call the people users, you could call them constituents, whatever you want to call them, but those who govern and rule Facebookistan, you know, have created terms of service and they say, well, you click degree and you're using the service, so therefore you must consent and therefore we can change the privacy policies whenever we feel like it and, you know, we've got certain rules around what, you know, how your identity needs to work and how you need to be required to use your real name and if you don't use your real name and it gets reported, we can deactivate your account, even if you're a dissident who might get tortured, you know, as a result of, you know, the activism that you're doing, but they've created this sort of private governance system that overlaps over the entire world, you know, or at least all world, most countries, except for those with so little Internet access, it doesn't matter and those that block Facebook, like China, but, and this works positively and negatively, right? So, we saw last year how people in the Middle East and North Africa used this global community, this global platform to challenge the sovereignty of their physical governments, successfully in a couple of cases. On the other hand, you've seen situations like, you know, people in Iran getting tortured for their Facebook passwords and because everybody on there, you know, for the most part is using their real name, then, you know, the police can then go track down everybody's friends who are talking to them about political matters or working with them to organize. And so then there's this question of to what extent are these private sovereigns of cyberspace accountable to their constituents to what extent are they concerned with the rights of everybody who's using the network, not just saying, well, the majority of people are fine with it, we're growing, so, you know, stop complaining, you know, you're kind of just a marginal minority that doesn't really matter for our business. And so kind of how is the way in which these platforms are evolving going to affect the potential for us to use these tools democratically, and how is that going to affect our relationship with our physical governments and ultimately our physical freedom? You know, this plays out and interacts in ways that we don't have good mechanisms or frameworks of even thinking about it to deal with it. So ultimately, you know, if governance, you know, and not talking about autocratic governance, but if governance that actually serves people is about not only providing services and security, but constraining abuse of power and holding power accountable, the systems of physical sovereignty, geopolitics, and also business practices, like businesses are run and governed, corporate governance, don't work to constrain the abuse of power and hold the exercise of power accountable across this globally interconnected set of digital networks that comprises the Internet. And we're a long way from figuring out, you know, how to get there. Right. So like I said, our job today is to pose questions. We're not necessarily have answers. Shalini Ventorelli is a professor at American University. So you've spent a lot of time watching what the UN is doing in this, in their whole ecosystem. What have they figured out or not figured out? First of all, thank you, Dan, for organizing this and for inviting us. I have to say that my students have been reading John Perry Barlow's manifesto now for more than a decade. And Rebecca, you'll be happy to know they're going to be reading your book in my classes. So, you know, I'm just delighted to be here on the panel with you. Yeah, I have had an association with the UN, I think going back to my teenage years, when, you know, at the age of 17, I got my first job in the United Nations. And since then have been, you know, in all kinds of consulting committees as expert advisor into different agencies, like the UN Development Program, UNESCO, the ITU. And so I have a sort of inside-outside understanding and John Perry Barlow can perhaps, and maybe even you, Rebecca, since you were there, recently can comment on whether or not you are feeling more hopeful after meeting with everyone there yesterday. But I have to tell you, I have a grimmer understanding of the commitment of the UN system, both as a structure and in terms of the actors, the good will of the actors, commitment to access to communication and open communication. What I'd like to address is a way of thinking about the problem in the UN system in terms of hurdles to open borderless communication. Also, some of the short-sightedness of U.S. policy on this matter. And then perhaps point to a way, you're right, we can't answer it, but point to a way of thinking about the way forward. Probably the most prescient understanding of what the possibilities of an Internet in open, borderless communication space. I haven't found anything better than a couple of sentences in an 1813 letter that Jefferson wrote to Isaac MacPherson. And he articulated it not only in terms of the Internet, but on what's coming down the pike, because I've always maintained that really communication is about the collision of minds. And this process began over a very long time period beginning with printing when minds collided on the page. And the page was something that could cross borders, and so ideas could cross borders. But he wrote that ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe for the moral and mutual benefit or instruction of man and the improvement of his condition. Now the basic purpose of the spread of ideas is for knowledge and for the improvement of the human condition. Like fire, expansible all over space, and like the air in which we breathe and move, and this is the really important terms that he used, which point to the future of where communication will be going. Like the air we breathe and move and have a physical being incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. And that's what Rebecca just mentioned. Incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. It's a reminder that the argument began about man. It is not about nations. It is not about different cultures. The argument began about man and the universal rights of speech and ideas spreading like air and fire. Now the problem with the human condition is deeply, deeply rooted. And like all root problems, they're very hard to resolve by simple modifications. In my view, that root problem after many, many years of careful analysis and looking how rationales are provided, because we experts who are looking at various things will advance recommendations for improving things and will have them overturned or dismissed or some other strange version will ensue that is in the member states. And so tracing it back, and I just mentioned this to Dan when I came in, tracing it back, it goes to the Faustian bargain, and if I may call it the Faustian curse, that we Americans entered into on one fateful day in 1948, when we basically made a practical compromise with Papa Stalin. And so we had this beautiful document, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and we put in article 19 as a kind of extrapolation of our vision of freedom of speech, which then did spread around the world. But then we slapped in the hole as big as a Hummer into which, you know, any government could just drive through and that's article 29. And if I just read you that in the exercise of these rights and freedoms, every one shall be subject to limitations, and I'll skip the intervening, such as requirements of morality, public order, and general welfare. Well, obviously, morality, public order, and general welfare determined by regimes. So regimes version of what is order in human rights, especially in article 19, because it is intangible, because it arises from the human conscience, because it's about the abolition of minds, and because it affects values. And so who's going to determine that? Obviously not individuals, it is the states themselves. This you can see in 2000. So you jump from 1948 to 2000. Dan mentioned to me, let's talk about the UN Millennium Challenge Goals. So in the Millennium Challenge Goals you find something really interesting. There's something conspicuous for its absence. Every kind of right is referred to, except the rights of speech, freedom of expression. That is just ignored completely. And, you know, it's sort of article 29 is obviously the dream of Caesar. It is the dream of Caesar going back to the beginning of time. And it makes the freedom of speech right highly vulnerable, and you can see that in the Millennium Challenge Goals in 2011, which was last year, a decade after the Millennium Challenge Goals, you see the report on the Millennium Challenge Goals, which is the blueprint for where the UN wants to go in terms of its A-level priorities. You see, again, no mention of freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Everything else is mentioned, rights to security, rights to development, which beg the question of how do you get those rights? There's, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, you can't claim rights without the right of speech. That is the only right that allows you to stand up and claim the other rights. In other words, it's the right to have rights. The second thing that's going on, obviously, in the UN is this deadly convergence of cross-national regulatory controls. It's almost like back in 1995, 1996, John Perry Barlow mentioned he went into the White House. I was on the other side of the Atlantic in Europe and I attended meetings between the U.S. government and the European government, which was led at the time by friends. And the French were, you know, they have a kind of an insight that somehow, you know, always is dead on in terms of recognizing the nature of the threat. And they recognize immediately and instantaneously that the Internet had, at its basis in, you know, the entire protocol layer. You know, John Postel, the guardian of this Constitution of the Internet, they recognize that it encapsulated, you know, these open speech, consensus-driven, antisocial control values. And they reminded the Americans, listen, we have communication regulation. And don't think just because this is a new technology that is coming out of America, that somehow it's not subject to our existing rules and regulations. And thereupon, they spent the next decade proving to Americans how they can do it. And these are democratic countries in Europe. The next thing I noticed was Singapore, superb and superlative understanding of social control of communication space, while still not being a brutal dictatorship, right? But definitely a communication space governed by censorship codes. Both the French model and the Singapore model then went viral. They basically went viral. Every country was copying them, adopting them. China's whole system was kind of the genesis of it was the success of the Singapore model, completely digitized state in which a big brother knows every single thing you do from brushing your teeth in the morning to what you said to your friend. You go in Singapore and you teach your students, they're afraid to raise their hand. They'll call you in the dead of night to go out to have, you know, take out somewhere and then they'll tell you what they really think. And so, you know, every regime dreams of that kind of order of social control. So this kind of convergence of cross-national regulatory control, which is, you know, on a fairly clip track, it is not on the decline. And finally, the agencies of the UN themselves that actively take a proactive role in expanding speech control. And the UN Human Rights Council is, of course, notorious for this. You have the guardians of human rights being the worst abuses, the most barbaric dictatorships, being the guardians of the universal rights of men. And the new types of ideas that people have to be protected from the criticism of their values and their beliefs and their ideology. Something, again, that they very much wish to achieve through a UN platform so it becomes international law. Now there's a sort of sliding scale here in terms of U.S. involvement. I notice in successive administrations, we're sort of gradually and incrementally giving ground here and there on these questions of speech. So instead of doing what, you know, following Jefferson's vision, we're saying, okay, we'll cut a little corner here. We'll cut a little corner here with this document and that document, change the wording here just so that we can participate in this system. So the, you know, the outcome of this, the effect of this, is the digital magnification and that's what the digital universe does. It magnifies. It exponentially magnifies these phenomena. So the digital magnification of cultural absolutism and speech absolutism and activism whereby the free speech struggles of the past have become almost irrelevant. Now what is U.S. policy on this, say, in terms of really active, proactive policy? I'm going to look at something that Rebecca talks about and I'd be really interested in your view on this. But the U.S., it seems to me, in terms of its foreign policy towards the rest of the world on speech rights, is really consumed with public diplomacy and soft power first and foremost, which in a sense is marketing. Okay? Yeah, that has its usefulness. Does it advance the cause of free speech? Absolutely not. The other one is internet freedom, which sounds great. I think it just sounds great, but it's a concept, guess what, whose fate is tied to a technology. So you're saying, you know, that a particular technology, you know, is a human right and that we should keep it free, but down the road there will be other technologies. The internet will, you know, in less than 50 years, maybe even disconnected from physical devices, right? So XYZ technology, ABC technology, should we then reinvent the notion of freedom and tie it to those future technologies? So what I'm saying is it's not a fundamental principle that is being advanced with respect to the speech rights of mankind through this very limited notion of internet freedom, because the speech rights of mankind transcend all communication technologies, and they have never been and never should be technologically confined. So what would I suggest, and I'll just conclude with that in terms of a way of thinking forward. I think that Dan began with the 550 challenge and earlier, I think over the past decade you've been working at this and John Perry Barlow is working in this and Rebecca, you've been in the field working in this, is that I think if we use the word let's emancipate the internet, let's emancipate cyber, the cyberspace, that wouldn't be too much of a stretch of an exaggerated term to use. And I would add to that emancipate the internet from the Faustian Compact, the Compact that has generated a virtuous cycle since 1948. We are not able to advance speech rights, because of the Constitution of the United States, which is the basis of all international law, has basically has a self-cancelling mechanism where Article 19 is cancelled out by Article 29, and so there isn't any basis for advancing fundamental laws with respect to speech rights. And so what I would suggest is that we are at a time and this is what makes it so exciting to be in the second decade of the 21st century is that there is a stirring in mankind going on, the effects of the internet on the ground, the social media tools that have become available, and also a crisis of frustration with the hurdles and obstacles to human flourishing that are present in so many societies, whether it's caused by cultural, whether it's caused by politics, whether it's caused by globalization. But this frustration finding a way to connect to these technologies and use them to mobilize social action to transform societies at the local level. That is a huge, huge opportunity to think about a new kind of concept going forward in this Emancipation Project for the internet. So commencing a campaign for example, the Occupy movement has sort of provided a meme, which is to say that let's not wait for laws to catch up because they'll never catch up, as I just mentioned, the structural issue with international law is that it cannot be disconnected from its constitution. So it's never going to catch up and the idea is a global citizen movement, a global citizen occupied digital culture movement, which was just briefly demonstrated just in the last couple of weeks when several sites went dark, led by Reddit. Across all digital platforms, people are stirring, they're ready for this. They are frustrated with the blockages, the constant social controls that prevent them from achieving and fulfilling their dreams around the world. And I think that that kind of global citizen movement to create digital sovereignty, going back to what John Perry Barlow had talked about, that moment is ripe because I can assure you and I'm not saying this cynically, I don't think the solution will come from nation state laws. Okay, excellent. And so hold that thought and we're going to change gears a little bit and bring the other panelists on board. Now Paul, I invited you here to talk about telecom songs frontier, but you've had quite a journey through the communication policy world from Senator Rockefeller's office to the FCC and to the UN. But go ahead and sort of just, if you could just sort of summarize your feeling about where things are going and how telecom songs frontier fits into that. Sure. So thanks for having me on Paul Margie. I'm the US representative of telecom song frontier telecom without borders. And so I guess our mission is a very small piece of what was being talked about today. We care a lot about access to communications. That's our goal, but we do it in some very narrow places. So we have three main things that we try to do. Two of them are in emergencies and one is in longer term emergencies in between the critical ones. So we're a 12 year old organization with deployment bases in Europe in Nicaragua and in Thailand. We've got emergency response personnel that are ready 24 hours a day to deploy anywhere in the world and set up communications facilities within 24 hours of a disaster or an emergency or a conflict. And what we do is when we get there, number one, we set up an emergency telecom internet access hub for the emergency response community. Whether those are search and rescue teams, medical teams, UN folks, local emergency responders and we try to give them as soon as they arrive access to the internet, access to other telecommunications tools so that they can do their jobs. And we heard a little bit about how some of the logistical problems of getting equipment to everyone in the world are so difficult and that we haven't solved them for water and sanitation. And I guess our take on that is that part of the reason we haven't solved them for water and sanitation is because of a lack of access to telecommunications, a lack of access to the internet. Just imagine trying to do your jobs without access to the network tools that you have. And in an emergency, especially in the first days of the emergency, lacking access to networks can be crippling. And so we try to make sure that the most important folks in those first days, the guys that are digging through the rubble, the people who are trying to figure out what medical supplies to bring in have the best possible connectivity that they can have. The second thing we do in emergencies is we go to the survivors' camps and we provide free telephone calls to people who survived the disaster. So we'll go and give a voucher to each family in the camps. The camps will then we set up a table like this. We set up a satellite facility usually. And then we give each family a free three-minute phone call to whoever they want. Usually the folks are trying to reach family members to tell them that they're alive, that some family members are dead, try to reconnect families that have been divided between camps, which is very frequent in big disasters, or to try to engage in self-help where they want to in places where the governments have been decimated by a disaster like in Haiti, they want to make sure that they can use their family resources in order to get help. When is the western union money going to be available so I don't have to walk halfway across town and wait in line all day on the wrong day. And then the third thing we do is in between these critical events, we've got these exceptional people placed around the world and we do long-term emergency work. And we try to use the power of these technologies to help UN agencies, local NGOs, government, whoever it is, local communities, solve long-term problems. And so we had a long-term project in Niger where some very smart people had figured out that price fluctuations in commodities, in food commodities could be tracked in such a way that you could predict food insecurity months in advance. The problem was being able to gather that information in a reliable way and feed it into a central point quickly. And in a way where you knew exactly when it had been gathered and so that it was reliable. So we helped them by setting up a circuit riding team of people with a set of nodes so that people could communicate more easily and radically reduce the amount of time between gathering that information and putting that information into action. We work in Nicaragua with the government fighting dengue fever. I don't know how many have worked down there, but dengue fever is a terrible disease and there are limited resources to fight it. We try to use mobile technologies to allow them to marshal the forces that they do have most effectively against the particular communities that have the biggest dengue fever outbreak that day for spraying, for example. Or so that we can track where the disease, help them track where the disease is so that they can put the resources in the right place. Or we have a project that we work on with the Oxford University Health System on the border between Myanmar and Thailand where there are a string of refugee camps and in a heavily malarial area. And a lot of the people that are coming over are pregnant women. Pregnant women who get malaria, malaria is bad to begin with if you're pregnant it's a lot worse. And so the Oxford working with the leading medical school in Thailand has set up a system to treat these folks as they come across. But it was a completely unconnected area and so we helped them network that area as well. So the three big things we do, one is we make sure that any emergency responder as soon as possible has connectivity in a disaster, whether that's Haiti or the Asian tsunami or we spent months and months in Libya this year or last year. Number two is we try to get to the actual people who are suffering, who are disconnected and try to make sure that they are connected at least minimally so that they can use some of these networks to help themselves. And then third in between emergencies we try to use our terrific people around the world to use these same tools for longer emergencies. Okay, so we're going to do a speed round in a little bit and start thinking about your questions. John Bergmeier, we're talking about connecting everyone on earth but we haven't even managed that in America, right? So where do we stand on that? Yeah, the very last people are very hard to connect. There's no getting around that. I think that universal internet access worldwide in the United States is just a hard, practical issue. It's not really one that is amenable to just theoretical speculation. You need to get down on the ground. You need to figure out what the challenges is in each community and probably the best way to make sure that each community gets connected is to make sure that there's a constituency in the community that wants internet access and that knows what the challenges are, that knows what the geography is and knows what the population is. So essentially public knowledge we have supported various policies that enable communities to help themselves. We think that wireless internet access in communities is a very strong policy and I think public policy should be focused on getting rid of what the largest barriers are to communities getting connected. One instance of this would be just backhaul access. It's not that one house has trouble communicating to another house or that last mile infrastructure within a rural community might be challenging. It's getting that community attached to the wider network and how do you direct resources to make sure that the infrastructure can support that. Okay, John, we're going to come back to you. Is there any summary points you want to make from what you heard? I think it would be nice if we could leave today with at least some seed ideas of sort of the direction, the next direction we need to take. I mean, so John Barlow what's your feeling as kind of these first baby steps we should be making now that we've got two billion people on the internet if we didn't lose you? Okay. Go ahead, John. I hope it will be able to have a bit more of a conversation now that we've all made our statements. Yes. But there were several things that struck me as we went through this. One of them is there is still an underlying sense that there are informational no's and no nots and I or haves and have nots and I am sensitive to that. I've spent a lot of time in Africa trying to help with that problem years ago but I believe that it's more a matter of informational haves and don't have yet but will have shortly. I mean, there are already more cell phones on this planet than there are toilets and most of those cell phones are going to be smart phones relatively rapidly. I don't think that the existing governance is even sort of ready for this eventuality but it's coming anyway. Another thing I've been troubling myself with the difference between bills of rights in terms of service obviously for quite a while now but I had a visit with the Human Rights Ambassadors the other day to Google and something occurred to me that was really kind of startling and I don't know I haven't had a chance to think this all the way through but given the paralysis and fibrillation of almost every nation state's government it struck me that Google had a form of governance that was quite a bit more responsive than ours and actually quite a bit more directed to the desires of its constituents namely the people who do business over Google and this could be said of Facebook or of other things. I mean when these services haul something out that feels like an abridgment of the rights of their users the users generally are so adamant about their opposition that they get hauled right back in. I mean Google buzz lasted about three days it seems because it was just wildly unpopular I noticed we had a presentation from the girl who is in charge of public policy over YouTube videos it was very interesting finding out how they actually censor YouTube videos and they do but it's a crowd sourced censoring system if more than a hundred users flag something as being offensive over a fairly short period of time then they take a look at it and eventually there's a kind of vote that is more dependent on the communities discussed or opposition than on the governments so I think there's the beginning of something hopeful in these entities themselves I don't want to be completely sanguine about it because nobody elected them but I don't feel like I elected anybody in Congress at this point I mean I feel completely cut off from any sense of their accountability to me as a voter and I think most Americans do finally one of the things that I've been toying with and I'd be interested to hear some of the reactions to this in law there's always a question about standing who has standing who can come into the court and say that their rights have been abused or that the law has been violated in regard to them and there's been over the course of time a lot of litigation about whether or not nature has standing and now in most cases it's regarded as having standing I think that we can extend that legal principle just starting to look at endowing speech itself ideas themselves knowledge itself understanding and rights I think it's a lot easier to go forward and say we are in favor of the free flow of information and we are against anything that impedes that rather than saying we are preserving the rights of this or that individual and this or that jurisdiction to speak his mind because if you can get countries to understand the for one thing the critical economic value that adheres to free and informational flow they may be somewhat more willing to concede that there are things that they don't like that ought to be expressed and in the overall best interests of their economy and their political their political development would be better to leave expressed now this is going to be tough because you've got an awful lot of people who institutions not so much people but you have a lot of institutions that are trying to preserve the industrial period and trying to preserve all the economic understandings of the industrial period and trying to preserve their own broken business models by claiming that they own speech that expression is no different from a toaster and it's something that they own and if somebody if somebody hears some bit of speech they haven't paid for that they are stealing it somehow and these folks and institutions have become extremely powerful in Geneva and in Washington I talked to the fellow who's the head of cyber security for the national security council last night and he said well surely you believe that the United States needs to do everything it can to stop this terrible abuse of our intellectual property overseas you know some of that is my expression too and personally I would rather have people singing my songs than having the internet being compromised so that you can stop somebody from hearing them so let me get a reaction from the panel anybody want to speak to that from the panel here you know I think John has pointed out something he said earlier you know you really cannot enforce property rights in a world that transcends atoms and I think that was a very insightful comment we actually have a crisis of authorship in cyberspace we are going through that crisis right now and John has put his finger on it not only is it going to be impossible to you know you can come up with the smartest laws honestly you can even have a societal consensus about those laws currently the issue is that oh you know these laws are highly contentious we've got different industries the old media, the new media industry polarized and we've got people on the left and right ideologically polarized so we've got all these interest groups all over the place but let's say hypothetically you know you have a kind of a draft legislation that I have no doubt it will pass eventually something will pass and so you can sort of argue well this has the consensus of you know a cross party and of the major social groups who've come around okay so what it still can't really I mean it's not going to stop the bleeding and so we have to think in a different way about authorship when it comes to idea generation because cyberspace is produce use diffuse how you there's no way to stop production of ideas there's no way to stop exploitation and use of ideas there's no way to stop diffusion of those ideas so you can attach in formal terms some kind of property a label to it but there is a kind of de facto one would say citizen led sovereignty already emerging in cyberspace and as knowledge about that citizen led sovereignty spreads to different corners of the world you're going to see more activism to have access to those ideas to produce use diffuse and to engage in that process of knowledge production one of the most important factors historically because I also study the knowledge economy what are the key you know catalytic factors and one of the most important factors that we've noticed from the time of the middle ages to today is the factor of social exploitation so you can produce all the patents and copyrighted intellectual property you can invest in R&D and you know you can sort of have a high percentage of GDP invested in the production of intangible goods it will generate no developmental effects on your society unless and until you release it to social exploitation and that's when the real effects take place and they are cascading effects that benefit everyone else I mean that basic lesson of history doesn't seem to me to be reflected in the laws that we are seeking not only for ourselves but that we wish to impose and push others to do Rebecca is there anything you want to add to that? Well there's you know it would be great to just kind of sit down with a beer and you know have a five hour conversation with Barlow and I look forward to doing that I mean you know there's a lot that he said there but just to pick up on the one point about his visit to Google and the activism that we're seeing within a lot of these platforms and it is very encouraging and I was also encouraged for instance with Google Plus kind of their next attempt at social networking after Buzz failed so horribly that you know they started out sharing everybody to use their real names having a real ID policy kind of like Facebook but users rebelled and yelled and screamed and organized against it and Google listened and they're starting to adjust that policy and they are you know they've made privacy policy adjustments and we're seeing them reaching out to a lot of different constituencies that have concerns about that in ways that I find encouraging and you know not that they're getting anything right by any means but I think you know two things from that one is that I think users by kind of thinking of themselves less as users and more as constituents could be doing a lot more even we could be doing a lot more to organize you know engage in almost sort of collective bargaining you know sort of some kind of combination of shareholder activism consumer activism and labor activism you know kind of take some combination of those mechanisms and find ways to be more organized about taking our concerns to companies that are running these platforms and services we depend on so heavily and find ways to kind of raise our concerns and interact with the companies about how these products a lot earlier on in the cycle so rather after it rolls out and after everybody gets pissed off you know can you have more of a conversation earlier on about how they're developing it and can they be consulting different communities and what are those mechanisms and would it can you see perhaps the companies finding ways innovating and finding ways to you know as they're developing products to reach out more to their constituencies in ways that will enable them to avoid the screw ups like Google Buzz or what we saw with Google Plus and Identity and create value as well you know it kind of increases the trust increases the legitimacy of the way they're running and shaping and programming and engineering their platforms and services and ends up being of course to great commercial benefit to them because it's something that people feel better about rather than you know well I have to use it because all my friends are there but I don't really trust it you know wouldn't you rather have people feeling that they have real ownership and real buy-in somehow and isn't that ultimately going to be in your greater long-term commercial interest to innovate in ways that enable that to happen and so I would really hope that the most forward-thinking companies will really make efforts both to welcome more activism from their constituencies but also to think about how they can kind of you know take advantage of it and benefit from it and that you know also there's of course a lot of internet companies are concerned about being regulated well maybe there's going to be less pressure to regulate them if they sort out these problems with their constituents in advance rather than have everybody mad at them about how they screwed everybody on privacy you know settings or something and so how can you know because you know the nation state regulation is so reactive and you know doesn't work so well in kind of dealing with technologies and innovations that we would really like to see so you know what kind of you know I don't know if it's like management innovation or sort of political innovation within a private business with their constituents or what you want to call it I don't even know what you really call it but there is tremendous you know ground for really innovative new structures to processes to take place that we're only seeing the very kind of embryonic sparks of at the moment are there any questions in the audience we have a microphone bring the microphone up my name is Lee Young as the user of this high tech and from the beginning we noticed a span of scam and authority but I think now if they say all kind of obstruction spying mobile phone interrupt obstruction or temporary you are let's say election information candidate information or even you are any personal information there's privacy everything so which organization or coordination or government agency would handle this properly whether it's the FTC or FEC or the Department of Justice exactly how do they coordinate together so where does she turn for privacy concerns well I can tell you I'll put on my other hat but so it depends what country you're in so in the US unlike the Europeans we've taken a privacy approach where we've regulated either individual technologies or applications or types of users or particularly sensitive pieces of information many times those have been done through individual laws and given the responsibility of them given to different parts of the government and so the Europeans have taken a more holistic approach where they have unified legal instruments that allow you to regulate privacy from one legal instrument and then give it to more centralized authorities there's kind of positives and negatives to each of those approaches I think but in the US generally what's happened is when there's a privacy incident if it rises over some magic level we get a new privacy law and that law will be on health information or on children's privacy or on financial privacy and we don't have a unified big one place that you can go to so it kind of depends on what piece of information you're worried about another interesting model would be the Canadian model where they've got some a little bit of both but then they also have a privacy on Budsman kind of position within the government of Privacy that not only looks at what all the other agencies are doing but also looks at the privacy implications of apparently non-privacy related regulations and so that's another way you might be able to handle it but the answer to your question is it's kind of complicated in the US at least because it could be several different agencies and so that's one of the reasons statements John Mitchell you wanted to describe your efforts with the lawyer's skill just introduce yourself real quick I'm John Mitchell an attorney in private practice here in DC doing antitrust, first amendment and copyright types of issues but I'm also a member of the National Lawyer's Skills Committee on Democratic Communications some of you may know the NLG is sort of the boots on the ground for the Occupy movement but the little Committee on Democratic Communications is often addressed some of the international types of rules of the road treaties and so forth dealing with the international counterpart to the first amendment and it does want to sort of make itself available to help assist in the legal framework for some of these kinds of efforts that is we're not the ones that understand fully the technology of behind our ability to communicate internationally but to take one example, as a US citizen I have a first amendment right to be free from the government suppressing my communications and today I can communicate with someone in Singapore whose government may not allow them to communicate with me which raises the interesting question then what business does the United States have entering into a treaty that has a provision like article 29 that says well we will agree with a foreign government that they can prevent their people from communicating with you or you communicating with them it raises this now to a whole new level and suggests that we can no longer have a sort of vulcanized freedom of speech where each country is entitled to have its own freedom of speech rules when I as an American citizen want to claim that my government has no business prohibiting me from communicating with anybody that my internet connection will normally they can stop you from visiting the TSA can stop you from visiting but you can still make the call absolutely other questions statements since you're permitting statements I wanted to put in a plug and invite any of the panelists whose remarks I enjoyed very much to attend an international law section DC bar international law section pro bono fair at which a number of human rights organizations will be presenting their work talking individually to people it's Thursday, February 9th, 12 to 2 p.m. law offices of Arnold and Porter 55 12th street and your website or something you can go to the DC bar website and that'll give you information on it question other questions go ahead Ken said something interesting she used the word buy in and most of human beings automatically buy into the fact that you're born in a certain place that place determines a lot of what you can do what you can't do the interesting thing of course about the internet or the worldwide web is that anybody can buy in they're so cheap in the sense that your telephone or internet connection you can buy in the cheapness of that participation is both good and bad in the sense that you can express anything anywhere in the world on the other hand you may not have to take responsibility for it and I think that's one of the things that we should discuss is there a distinction between buy in and consent buy in I guess that's maybe a problem with the English language the buy in has a notation do you have a commitment to something let's face it you can be outside of Egypt and you can be fomenting a lot of problems in Egypt that you have nothing to do with and if you're happy doing that that could be bad for Egypt good for you I'm assuming lawyers would like to discuss anything you want to say about buy in sure if I have anything to say about buy in but I think what your real point was was less about buy in and more about people having to take responsibility and be held accountable for their actions not just governments or companies but individuals who might be spreading lies or causing trouble I think that's my understanding of your point or committing crimes or behaving irresponsibly with technology is that sort of your point if you are Putin you wouldn't want people to do that and are you behaving irresponsibly if you are getting Russians to say hey there's nothing wrong with your government it cuts both ways so is it irresponsible to give people the power to oppose their government that's another form buying in my interpretation is sort of a commitment right I guess I'm not entirely sure if I understand your entire question or point but I think there are a number of issues that I seem to be picking up one is has to do with just people taking responsibility for their actions on the internet and a lot of people who act on the internet without taking responsibility for their actions and doing things that are socially irresponsible in different ways and there's a big debate of course about whether anonymity should be allowed because if you allow anonymity then you know people it's easier to spam it's easier to commit crime it's easier to harass people and spread lies and so on yet at the same time anonymity makes dissent possible and so as with so much in the physical world they're trade-offs right and so then you know you can certainly say okay well if we try to build more accountability mechanisms into the internet so that everybody is physically kind of tied to whatever they do and they can be held responsible does that also make dissent impossible and does that also expose vulnerable people minorities people who are vulnerable to abuse or arrest or you know physical harm because the community around them doesn't like what they have to say but they're saying something you know that they have a right to say that they oppose something are you eliminating the possibility that they can be heard and that they can organize for change and so then the question is you know is that a trade-off you want to make in exchange for making bad people more accountable or are there other ways of dealing with bad behavior on the internet that doesn't eliminate people's ability to conduct dissent and people who are vulnerable to speak out and be heard so Barlow you wanted to insert something I'd like to break in here briefly if I can do this briefly you know we at EFF spend an awful lot of time thinking about anonymity and responsibility shoot and sorry and you know I've come to feel the same way about anonymity that I feel about guns I'm from Wyoming you know where guns are part of the furniture and I think that anonymity should be used very sparingly because I really believe that the only thing that can protect us from the kinds of currencies that this gentleman is talking about is accountability accountability and there has to be accountability on a personal level for everything we manifest in cyberspace or in the world for that matter and that requires that we know who we are at the same time there are circumstances where in order for speech to take place at all and I think about places like Syria at the moment in order for people to speak freely they have to be able to do so anonymously and there has to be a social code that we collectively develop as a species at this point about when we use anonymity and how sparingly we use it and when we allow ourselves to be accountable for our words in cyberspace our deeds in essence because that's a place where the word has become flesh in a very material way okay Shalini go ahead a couple of things the term came up which I think needs elaboration it's very important the term that you use which was consent and I think Rebecca's really critical concept of consent is absolutely vital to understanding the nature of the issue but I would like to add one more term to that and that term goes back to the basic concept of the internet it's fundamental invention and the engineers sort of encapsulated in that protocol this term which is the notion of consensus so consent which can be passive it doesn't necessarily have to be active just by using something you're consenting to it just by living in America you're consenting to its laws no one comes to you and seeks your consent to the law that is implicit is something much more active and so the way the internet was originally envisioned is a social space that was consensus driven in terms of the rules and that everyone outside the space especially institutions were not legitimate in imposing their external order to this space in other words whoever used and participated in that space participated also in a consensus driven rule governed system and I think if we stay with that concept as we look at the internet you know really penetrating down to the molecular level of human life in every corner of the world Tibet, Mongolia you name it the remotest regions where people don't even have schools but they have access to the internet then we're talking about solutions, possible solutions to issues even like copyright for example what would be a consensus driven notion of respective authorship if it's imposed by states it will be broken by users it has to be consensus driven, I think you alluded to this set of rules also the ultimate test of whether the internet is functioning, whether digital world is functioning is whether or not it empowers human communities to transform their life that is the one and only effective test of whether in fact we have a functioning and functional cyber world and that is a test to which every code should be subjected let me pick up on that a little bit and we're kind of in the final run here now one of the problems we have if we're going to bring internet to everyone on earth is defining what that means I mean is what they have in China internet and we get to count those 500 million people or do we still have work to do there and so you're saying there's there's maybe some kind of a test as to whether that connection to the internet is actually enabling human aspiration there's needs to be some kind of a way to figure that out John do you yes do you think what if the consensus was that what they have in China was not the internet well gosh I think Rebecca is better able to comment on this than I am but I think that the situation in China is very complex I mean it's my objective personally it's my mission in life that everybody everywhere will one day satisfy his or her curiosity about anything that can be known by people which means that ultimately the Chinese ought to be able to find out everything they want to know about the fallen gong if that's the issue at hand or anything else but I think that this is going to be a huge social transformation that has to take place I mean let's take in the example of China China most of the people who are in charge of China at this point remember the great cultural revolution which is a permanent scar on everybody's life and they see the internet as something that would make it possible for great cyclonic force of belief to spin itself up very rapidly in the manner that that did and there's a natural inclination to try to place capacitance in the system that keep things from spinning up too fast and I can understand that but I think that as we go forward the likelihood of that happening will be increasingly diminished because every sort of high pressure zone of belief like the great cultural revolution will be instantly bled out by the surrounding thermodynamics of other beliefs and I, you know that's probably a hopeful view but I think that gradually societies will come to recognize that it is in their best interest in every sense that information be able to flow freely from one mind to the next like fire illuminating the entire landscape and not just parts of it So Rebecca, I mean nobody has complained that I know of to say that what's going on in China censorship prevents it from being internet I mean that would be sort of a bit of good communication if people within China said actually I don't have the internet and I need these dimensions in order to have the internet So just to address that problem I mean it's I mean technically China is still connected to the internet Right somebody in Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou or Jinan or somewhere in Gansu or whatever most of the time they can send an email to somebody anywhere in the world and actually the email gets to them that means they have the internet Now it's a filtered internet and it has a lot of controls on it and the way it works is that the global internet enters China at about eight or nine different exchange points and their filters put on that and deep packets inspection technology put on that so that if you're trying to access a range of different websites overseas that the government has decided should be blocked or if you're trying to access websites that contain certain key words you'll get an error message on your browser and that's the great firewall of China in action and there are some people who complain that China only has an intranet that's not entirely true because if it had only an intranet it would be North Korea in North Korea you can only unless you're like a highly privileged person with special access you can only send access websites that are hosted within the country and you can only communicate with people that are inside the country that's an intranet but China is connected to the outside world people have to do business China cannot be an economic power without financial information economic information without small businesses large businesses communicating with their trading partners all over the world Walmart and Apple and all these companies could not be operating in China unless they actually had an internet so they do have an internet it's just that certain kinds of speech are constrained in terms of your ability to access certain content that's hosted outside of China now if you know how to use something called a circumvention tool which we probably don't have time to explain exactly how all that works you can trick your computer connection and your ISP into thinking you're going over here but you're actually going over there and then access the site that you really want to see because it thinks you're looking at something else and we won't explain the technical things to but so there are technologies to do that only a small minority of Chinese internet users know how to use these technologies or bother to use them but then there's also another layer of censorship and surveillance that goes on in China that is you know not at the gateway with the international level but because you know Facebook you know YouTube and blogspot and Twitter and all these different services are blocked by the great firewall most Chinese internet users who are avid social media users are not using the brands that we've heard of they're using search engines and social media networks that are run by Chinese companies that are hosted inside China hosted on servers inside China and so the Chinese government holds these companies liable for everything their users are doing the lawyers would call it intermediary liability very heavy liability and so if your company is enabling too much political organization of the type that the government does not want happening or if it's enabling the fallen gong to disseminate its ideas in a manner that the government thinks is out of control you can lose your business license so you have to set up an entire department of people to police and delete content now do they do it perfectly no there's still a lot of people who manage to report on incidents that happen in their village or you know train crash that happens and then you know expose how the government lied about it and so on so people you know it's hard to control it completely but the government imposes enough liability on these companies and enough kind of filtering at the gateway that nobody's been successful using the internet to organize an opposition party everybody who's tried is in jail you know people who've tried to disseminate treatises on multi-party democracy and political change are in jail people who signed on to them you know a large percentage of them have had visits either by their police or by the party secretary at their place of employment you know that there's enough of a chilling effect to keep things within a certain set of parameters but it's still an internet it's just an internet that is managed it's a managed domestic I think you could make the point and correct me if I'm wrong Rebecca but I think you could make am I on? I'm sorry I think you could make the point that the Chinese government actually knows the extent to which the internet is not fully controlled oh totally and is actually in a very long process of releasing those controls I guess yes and no I think to some extent the Chinese government benefits from the fact that it doesn't totally control it and so the fact that you know if I'm in a village somewhere and I'm able to expose malfeasance by the local officials and actually you know kind of have more of a use the internet to have more of a dialogue with my government and actually improve governance by using this technology I think that actually enhances the central government's legitimacy in many ways and at least parts of the government see it that way and see it to their advantage and see the internet to criticize a central official and that's like a different story so they kind of prioritize what they're trying to control because they know they can't control everything and they take advantage of actually lack of control in some areas and they kind of roll with it because yeah you can't control everything and they've given up trying but at the same time if you look at what's been going on in the last few months there are bloggers who've been blogging about kind of public affairs for the last you know five six years who've gotten their accounts shut down and they've been allowed to exist up until recently and that you know there's a leadership transition happening later this year and a lot of stuff that has been that the government has kind of been allowing to happen for the last several years is getting squeezed like a lot of Tibetan language blogs just got shut down over the past week you know so the screws are tightening they're getting more paranoid it's definitely not a linear process and you know it's certainly kind of hard to predict how it's going to play out but I think to the extent that the Chinese government and the Communist Party succeeds and kind of riding this whole thing is because they ride it and they don't try and control everything yeah and I think that they are also completely freaked out understandably by what's going on in the Arab world and what's going on in Russia absolutely they're very freaked out okay Laticia you have a question or Twitter statement so I really appreciate this discussion I'm learning a lot I really appreciated also Professor Ben Tarelli's comments about the US's sort of foreign policy or their approach to talking about the internet outside of the US in terms of internet freedom and that not really having an actual tangible or that not actually meaning much in a lot of ways so I appreciate this discussion however I feel like it might be internalizing that same kind of agenda where we're looking a lot in how other countries are treating the internet but we're not looking at how we understand internet freedom here in the United States we just want to know what the panelists think of issues that we're dealing with here especially given that we just dealt with SOPA and other kind of privacy or I'm sorry piracy policies here and also the huge digital divide that we face and what that means for especially communities of color and rural people and low income communities so I'd like to know a little bit more about that actually one minute left and unless you want to take that yeah we need to increase the constituency of active internet users who care about internet freedom both in the United States and abroad one way to do that is to focus as much on the actual getting of wires and computers in people's hands so that they can become active participants in the internet community as much as talking about the how to go about governing the internet once it's been established now on that thought more Corbett I invited Mora she's hiding in the back there and this is what she does sort of on the front lines day in day out is there anything you wanted to say or invite people to follow up with you afterwards or I mean it was a great question you just sort of stole my whole comments so I don't need to do the comments I want to tell a secret about Mora that she used to belong to a band and she played on the steps of the capital around 2001 on these issues but go ahead it is okay it was called the internet freedom rally right funny means a lot that was about you know letting the bells take over the internet which some people think they already have but at that point that was our biggest fear now we've got bigger issues and you know maybe if it's okay you know what I was going to say when I got up there that I can do is easily from back here is that yes the 550 challenge what I find so important about it is and the communications renaissance idea is that the internet is has become more than a tech issue or a broadband issue it is a societal issue it is an economic issue it is a democratic issue it is kind of an enabler and an empower for people from all kinds of constituencies and so that's why it's important for the 550 challenge to get it into everyone's hands because it allows everybody to be an artist to be a creator to be a participant in a democracy you just need a connection then it gets into the other issues what do you do now as a global community if we're all connected how are we going to structure it how are we going to govern it Sopa and Pippa and I would say in a small way in this country showed how much work we have to do in our own backyard and how little we remember how the rest of the world is watching us in what we do and now we have son of Sopa and Pippa or if you've been paying attention long enough the king and queen of Sopa and Pippa other countries are watching us and repeating us if you look at it on a much broader scale which is what Rebecca gets into which I'm hoping to read in the brief respite of Sopa and Pippa and son of Sopa and Pippa is that with the internet becoming this communications renaissance with it comes the great responsibility to ensure that it is used as a force for the greater good and not as a tool of evil or repression the wires are one thing let's do that and let's also be mindful that we structure it and govern it in a way that doesn't leave anybody out that uses it as a force for good that advances our society and our democracy and our global economy and also with regard to this country I think Sopa and Pippa even for those of us who kind of had this fight it's been ground hug day over and over again for like 20 years you know and this wasn't for people you know who are a little older remember this wasn't the first time this happened this happened during the communications decency act in the 90s you know a lot of people weren't around for that but you know the internet did rise up it was just a smaller internet and it wasn't you know it was still sort of a techie thing then maybe but we have a rare opportunity here and a lot of people have been talking about this about how to leverage what we created how to leverage the capital that was gathered by that effort and it was a postpartisan or nonpartisan or bipartisan response that you saw people you saw the occupiers and you saw the tea partiers fighting for internet freedom the same reasons because they sort of touched each other and came back around and I think that that's a really kind of profound starting point that you know maybe we've screwed up everything else in the old economy and certainly how Washington operates in the old economy but if you see the internet and technology as the new economy we have an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and to try to try to keep it from getting acquainted with the old way of doing things both in this country and in the next leave it there and we're almost on time thank you to the panel and again please pick up Rebecca's book before you leave that it's one concrete thing you can do and thank you very much for attending