 So, we'll have like 30-40 minute presentation after me, Giorgio Salentes will speak from the European Commission, then Michiel Lenars from NLNet, on the NGR Next Generation Internet Study, and then Maritje Schrager from the European Parliament. I will just have a few stories, and I think this is one of them. I think we basically know this slide. This is a little bit of an extremely old-school situation here. I never actually took a selfie, but I'm tempted to start taking one. But I'm also tempted to start in the same, which probably is not a very good idea. So, this actually is the old-school situation that we all know that we want to get away from. Now, we know that Burroughs is right. We need some kind of manager for the planet, but it will not be a manager. Like, it will be a network, it will be a team, it will be a community, just like we heard. So, just a few stories. These are the Fukeshu, and they were ronin, samurai without a master, and they could not carry a sword, and they were living around 1600, 1700 in Japan. And when you see, and they're still around, they play shakubashi music, and so what they did was they moved into a temple. They stayed there for about 10 years and didn't do anything. Then after 10 years, they got out, and they went to see the shogun, Edo, and they asked him, can we go out and play shakubashi music in the streets and collect alms? And the shogun said, OK, you can do that, but then you have to spy for me, because you wear these masks, nobody's looking at you, you hear everything, and so they said yes. So, they wore the mask. Now, when you see this, you see there's a mask, but when they take off the mask, it's good old Nietzsche, I'm the masquerade mayor, give me another mask, another mask. Basically, in the end, it's a group of people coming together, starting something. And this, I think, at this moment in time, with Internet of Things, AI, the big over-the-top players, the Uber, the Facebook, the Google, we all know them, sometimes it feels like it's sort of set, the game is done, but it isn't done. And it's always an alternative, and all the situations are historical. To me, this story was always very important, because it shows that, at any moment in time, if we have enough building blocks, we can start a new situation, a new given. This also was very important for me. This is, these are volcano readings. And for decades, actually for over a century, the volcanologists thought that the data was in the middle layer, and they had theory after theory, and they threw idea after idea into that middle layer, but nothing came out of it, because at some point, there was a physicist, Bernard Chouet, he looked at this, and he realized that the data is in the other layer, the data is in the small layer over there. And he actually managed to do that, and now the volcanologists are actually working with his theory. What was very interesting to me is that it's actually possible for a whole group of people to get such tunnel vision for decades, maybe even over a century, that they will not believe that they should look at something else, unless of course it takes another position to start doing that. And I think that's where we are, because the questions that we have is very simple. Naturally, it really, really is very simple. So what this next generation internet, this NGR, wants to get up, wants to sort of start a debate on, well first of all, the debate needs to be public. We need to get a lot more people involved in thinking with these questions, because we can only get one shot at making this a smart society if we want to make it smart and the question is, what kind of smart society do we want? And you're here, and you're very much a part of this. So how can we build a kind of team Europe, a kind of network communities, like a 500 million platform, making people, processes, and machines wiser every day in a meaningful way? Thank you. So now we move over to Giorgio, Giorgio Salantes. You want this one or you want the mic? Yes, hello. Good morning. Thank you for having me here. I'm coming from the European Commission. It's the executive arm of the European institutions. And it's a privilege to be in a venue like this. My background, however, is in engineering, so a long time ago I used to also go coding, but I had my shame to say how long time ago. Now, I'm going to give you what the European... I'm going to give you very briefly the timelines and some of the elements regarding budgets and efforts that the Commission is putting behind this initiative. What are we talking about here? We are talking about a new ambitious initiative of the European Commission. In the branch where our work of the European Commission we are funding research, just for having very quick set of who in the room if you can waive received funds from European projects, if you can very quickly to see. Okay? Not so many. That's a good sign. But we hope we hope that with this type of initiatives we will try to attract as many as possible to you. So, I'm not going to say and repeat some of the things that you already know. How important is the internet today and how important is it for the society? We can have if we have a snapshot now we can see that still we are at the infancy we can see new radical functionalities popping in. However, we see also problems popping in. We see fragmentation, we see concentration of power and for the citizens in particular we see some security and privacy concerns. What we will try to do and we will try to put wisely the money we put for research for Europe is try to do something that serves the citizens and for that we ask the question what can we do? And the obvious answer for us is that we defend with our policies European values and we will try to do the same thing with this initiative. So, we will push for the European values with the vehicle of the internet that we are going to develop. So, the trends we see nowadays are trends about having artificial intelligence on the hype which is supported by a plethora of data that is available. I mean, if I make a comparison to when I started my career in the university and I see because I was looking also at artificial intelligence the algorithms have not much much evolved but what has evolved and it is dramatic change is the availability of huge amounts of data for training for example and the connectivity combined with cheap processing power at the edges of the internet. As I said, principles of what we want to have, we want to have an internet which is human centric at the service of the people and of the society and for this we need the help and I will make the point later on we need the help of many disciplines but we will not forget that one of the disciplines that is at the core of the internet is the society that is building the small bits and pieces of the internet. So, another thing is that already we have people, if I can say the dinosaurs that were since the inception and they are still giving their nice guidelines and talks but the other thing that we need if we want to do these changes we need to mobilize the youngest talents that are shaping now the internet and I could not imagine a better venue for doing so to address to this venue here. If I can give you a roadmap how this has evolved so far from our side, what did we do so far? We started with a consultation we try to reach as many as possible and we try to get the feeling what an initiative like this should have as ingredients then the second step is that we launch a study and Michael after me will present some of the wisdom that we got from this study and we started already in our cycle of programs that we have which is the framework programs we start injecting money, asking for calls so already we have the first bits and pieces of what we think will have in the next generation internet how we can support it from the European point of view but the big the big challenge is laying ahead of us and as now I'm talking the European Commission is planning for the multi-annual framework program so where are we going to put the money in Europe in general and in particular where are we going to put the money to support research and more in detail how are we going to do this initiative so one thing that I believe is essential for you as a community I will not bother you with all the mechanics of the course and all this is that we adopt a little bit of different strategy here a typical problem in our program is that from the moment we launch a call for supporting researchers doing whatever kind of research to the moment of the implementation the time was too long and particularly research you cannot do that particularly in research that deals with technological advances like the internet that is evolving really fast the second thing is that we are notorious for our if I can say so bureaucracy and rules which are coming also by control I mean in the beginning when I was outside the commission I would say what is all this bureaucracy now that I enter inside I can see that there is a need also for a budgetary control but this has a problem of delaying things so we adopt a model of cascade funding we call it so what we are going to do is we are going to launch I tell it briefly in simple words we launch a call which gives money to intermediaries that can then cascade this type of funds during the implementation of this program to smaller groups even individuals and then these can do the necessary research for this initiative so one important issue is the cascade funding which I think makes and opens the door for communities that usually are outside so I ask the question who participated so far so it opens the door for communities or for individuals to come in get support and collaborate because it's not only the funding that is important in this sense it's also the collaboration across Europe we hope that's what we support so just to give you very quickly the numbers for the last of this framework program which is ending in 2020 we have put a bet of 50 million euros around and this is in the form of what are called intermediaries where we have two calls and in each call we are going to call three different areas and where intermediaries would get something like seven millions and will then cascade them to people the upcoming call is going to close for the intermediaries is going to close now in April and from April and onwards those intermediaries are going to inject this seven millions euro that I say gradually we also put some money for support actions that are going to support also the reach out to the communities and also the collaboration of results and also we put some money for international collaboration in particular with the US because we believe that what happens in the internet cannot be stay in the European we initially started we may have also other collaboration in other programs we do so but we started a very close collaboration with the United States so the big bet now is what will happen in the next framework program and this framework program we are talking about an escalation in in terms of budget but I think the most important is the multiplicative effect we expect to have in terms of engagement of people and communities now as I said I showed you the time I showed you the money and now I want to talk about the most important thing which is the people and as I said there are communities that we could reach so far with our programs the researchers, the research institutes but there are communities like this one or like the people who are dealing with civil society the people who are not purely technical I think we are indispensable and necessary for this initiative so the multidisciplinary context of developing this initiative is of prime importance and the most I could say the most interesting thing is that we want we will strive to have the people that are talented that could not find so far through our usual type of funding and support we wish to have them aligned towards the same initiative the initiative as I presented so in the beginning so I would pass the floor now to Michiel there is a simple site where our support action there aggregates all the information and I thank you for your attention ok is this on so I quickly have to switch so now I come from a completely different world in a sense we did this study for the commission I would never ever work with the commission again because I totally hated the way that funding works and I found it to be ineffective and I found it to be a charade however we ran into the right people so I work for a charity called enelnet foundation we've been around since 82 this is Thuis Hage he's really cool and I'm second generation within enelnet but already greybeard so we're in there for a long while so we ran into the commission very early on in this process this first consultation in 2016 and we thought oh my god this is going to be a disaster but we need this money so we assembled the crack team and we set out the work now we're going to talk about initiative like the next generation internet the problem is of course what is that people have a pretty crappy idea of what the internet is to them it's like a box and you just buy a new box and then you start inventing it it's a little, I don't know if people recall this image but you're connected to the internet it works and then you're done just like an old TV this is more like the internet it's really fastly complex and it's not a thing it's a network of independent networks so you can't upgrade them all because they're all different they're not coherent they're owned and operated by different people and there's some glue in there which is shared but this is on the top but those are also operated by different people so there's not a single thing to do and there's people interested in every aspect of it and they're doing whatever they feel like so another important thing is to know is that the internet has had its brain split and this is a I don't know if people know who this is this is Vint Cerf one of the two inventors of the IP protocol and he came to the Netherlands and he had he gave a presentation there at a certain point in time we just invented the internet protocols and then the NSA came to us and said well that's not going to do that's so not going to do we're going to need to invent something else for us but oh by the way don't tell the others so that is a pretty painful thing that's the 70s that is going really back to the roots of the whole thing but if you think about it it's not something you can create a next generation of quite easily but you really want to do and where do you start when you have like the community we have 500 million people in Europe with a big vessel of money we're putting money aside to do this kind of thing but then how do we organize that this can actually work well obviously so we try to drill down a little well it's not going to be the connections they're not the problem the whole physical layer is just that's why we initially believed in the internet because we owned our own infrastructure but now we get into more painful territory we talk about conventions we talk about standards we talk about protocols we talk about how people operate that's a lot steeper to work on and then there's code and there's commodity there's the stuff that people are running that people can download and start using and there's a lot of legacy hardware on it and we have to attach that as well and that includes all of the things that you own including the thing in your basement now changing the core conventions and the core protocols of the internet that is a huge beast of an effort I mean it's bordering on the insane things have never changed before people don't realize this all the other things that are just individual companies with a few big companies doing the same thing it's not still the internet the internet has not done it before the people that have to do it have not done it before and to make it even worse they sort of simultaneously through all three and a half billion of them will have to do it more or less in the same pace because otherwise it's still not going to work all previous internet next generation internet has failed there's even a Wikipedia this ambiguous page for it and that's that so the reality is this is this is a moonshot plus plus effort this is massacre it's the largest and it's the most obscene thing that man has ever created and we want to change it in flight with three and a half billion people on board and I mean even the US alone has 11 billion so we're going to have to hack budget a year just to attack the security of the internet so the political stakes are high economic stakes are high and of course the social stakes are tremendously high now we also have a bunch of highly critical users and when you talk about critical users there's different types of critical they're not really critical because they will use anything that's free but they're well they're heavily addicted so it's a tough thing and then on top of that I don't know if people probably know Parker's law of triviality it's from the 50s when you design a nuclear power plant you design a committee you assign a committee to work on that they will end up fighting over the color of the bike shed because that's what everybody understands everybody gets the internet because everybody's modern and has a twitter account so if you're still with me, if you're still not discouraged this is the path that we took without to engage with these folks broken this is the web so we said you can do a next generation if you don't I mean how do you create next generation people you have the current generation people then you put them together and they make next generation people have a lot of fun these people have never been involved with this public funding because of the obnoxiousness the whole process you guys don't want the paperwork but I work for a charity an LNET we give away money to people we do this kind of thing our budgets cannot reach here this is a factor a thousand higher than an LNET can reach and we know because all these people come to us over the years we know we need this money we know there's a huge demand out there for people that can actually do great things but we need these technical experts now we did a workshop during this call to be even more inclusive these are all the tags that we added to the people in that workshop and so this includes also the people that wrote the feminist internet manifesto this also is about whistleblowers this is about all dimensions of the infrastructure because they all need to be in different needs and perspectives interesting the problem is if you have an internet next generation internet plan and you have it all neatly tied up in graphs when you don't have the glue for it if you have separate calls and people will be yelling okay I can do something on transmission protocols or I can do something on secure web standards but if it's not glued together it's going to be a hail shot of efforts it's going to fail oh man this is getting irritating I will have to refresh my browser because that is so irritating okay I'm going to have to wing it here so we have we have images coming up we did this massive scan we worked for months and months we went to all these events from all these organizations there's an end to what people can do so we're just a small team there's a lot of people working on the internet in Europe and we made a huge effort to talk to as many people as we could and if you look at the internet as a safe place where you can just use things do things and party you should think a little of the story about the three pigs there's always a pig with the straw house and he's having a lot of fun that's where we built the internet next to that house and the threat model that we have now the threat model at the time was completely inadequate this is the kind of threat model that we want you will have AI attacks from whatever nation you don't like and they will find every gaping every port that is out there that is vulnerable so you're going to need some pretty fast response time we don't have response time now we have a pretty awful response time if people break something on the internet it takes years to fix it when DNS was broken in 2008 people are still seeing out there DNS servers that don't have DNSSEC IPv6 has been waiting since the previous century it takes ages to put things on the internet so we're very bad at this we're really bad at organizing things because all of your projects they end up I don't know if people know this wonderful site called ripology.org and if you've checked your projects there how well they spread across even across just Linux distros it takes ages and ages we don't have good mechanisms and when you're building a new internet you can't afford not to be connected to everything so we need good engineering practices we need continuous integration we need a lot of the things that just make sense from a software engineering point if you make sense when you're doing a next generation internet we don't have that like I mentioned before we need to stress from the ground up the internet is the the fundamentals of the internet are deeply problematic after snow everybody realizes this so how do we re-engineer this trustworthiness because we can make people trust the internet but that would be disastrous if they trust the thing that isn't trustworthy so we have to earn back this trust and that will take a lot of effort now in the long term we know that for instance DDoS attacks they're simply they cannot be stopped they're designed in a pretty bad way it's a pretty naive idea of how the network should be in the 70s so we need alternative plans there needs to be a plan B and this goes on many different levels this goes from making sure that objects don't have to come from a single server like I just had but they can just be there the frigging image was on my frigging computer but it just wouldn't show how stupid to recognize that it was there so why can't we not have smarter asset distribution to make it less fragile we want anti-fragility now what I mentioned before is the legacy middleware the internet is hostile against itself it's basically whenever you invent new stuff other parts of the internet are saying well but I was created in the 80s and I don't understand so I'll eject this from the internet so stop using whatever you're doing and so for instance even protocols like DNSSEC which are a rescue to an important aspect 10% of the networks have issues with DNSSEC packets so we know that we need to think more clever not just about a solution but about a solution that is able to take care of this legacy situation and that means that we have to understand far better and that takes a lot of money a lot of brain power because thinking of stuff that works is more difficult than thinking of stuff that works in a non-greenfield situation now the user also needs a lot more protection if you go to a store now and you buy a laptop and you go online here you're dead meat how can this be how can this be after we invent protocols that you buy new stuff you go on a public internet and you're taken so of course this takes a lot of stuff we've lost control of the browser I think everybody can see that this is advertising companies running the show this is no longer serving the interest of the user so why don't we make public money to be used for that purpose another important thing is I don't know how many people are here mining bitcoin and together with all the other people producing I think the 19th country when it comes to electrical power already and that's with 300,000 payments or 400,000 payments a day that's nothing there are supermarkets in my city that have that traffic volume and that is the 19th pollutant in electricity used on the planet if people are going to go that way and people are proposing blockchain like solutions we're going to have to do a lot better and so this is something that again you want people to look into you want people to have time to spend on this now if people are supposed to be going away from the big monopolies where are they going to go I mean if there's no road and if there's no destination there's no way that they even can get away so you need to regard the openness of the internet by making sure that there's no monopolies and if people need stuff then it needs to be available just like the email is available or the web is available anybody can use it this is the process that I explained so we had this we talked to all these communities we analyzed what they said we met up with a lot of experts even further breakdown and what we then did is to recommend to the commission three different topics first we extracted a vision for this because the vision is where it starts the vision is there can be many visions for instance there was a for the previous decades it was a vision Europe should have its own Google's Europe should have its own Amazon's the big companies look alike that is that is not a good idea that is never going to cut it so we start with a vision and this vision basically revolves around a very few simple principles it is legible but I actually extracted it in a bigger size now if you agree that the idea of the next generation isn't profit but that it should be an area that brings out the best in all of us then this inclusiveness and diversity are a real problem because that is not what the world is heading for we are not heading towards an inclusive system if you work at a few big companies you can invent the future and if not you are basically your fringe activity the second thing that is the basic we want everybody to be on board but the second thing is we want the internet to actually be very resilient because if you think about it you are going to put things inside your heart and it is actually going to grow you are going to put it in space and you can't touch it you are going to put it in the roads and imagine that the spectrum meltdown would happen with stuff inside your heart or inside a road there are reasons to minimize the attack surface and that happens at the protocol there the next thing is of course we need this component we need everything to be trustworthy because if you couldn't trust your own spine people may have seen this Bruce Willis film where there is a spy inside one of his teeth and he has to get it out of his own if you can't trust your own internet you have to be able to trust it we said it is a decentralized infrastructure so it is yours so you should be able to trust it you should know and understand what is in there and the third thing everybody should be able to innovate on top of it you can't innovate on top of Twitter you can create an app that uses its API but you cannot build a new business model on top of a company like that so this is our call to action now where to start the first thing that we recommend to the commission is say first we need to clean up our act we need to secure the parameter we need to make sure that we at least have a minimum amount of ground that we know we can trust that's really the first thing if we don't have that you only have 5.4 million to spend on each of these three topics this is well spent on people just taking a clear look at the internet the second thing is okay if people if we want people to be free to innovate they have to be able to get their social graph out they have to be able to get their data out and they need to be able to take it somewhere just like if I don't like Gmail I can set up my own email server if I don't like many other services on the internet the popular ones the Instagrams the signals the Facebook where am I going to go if I don't agree with that company that runs it where am I going to go so we need to create open source alternatives for these services and make sure that the data can be ported and the third one that we recommend is renovation of architecture so this is a long term thing it's we know that the first proposals to re-engineer the internet were from already from the 80s none of them have succeeded so it takes a long long time to even get something done so we need that kind of work that long term work to start right now now where does this community come in okay we know and we understand that you guys you will have bread to eat I mean that's not a problem and you don't need the paperwork from the commission however the interesting thing is the paperwork from the commission will go and you actually we will need that work and you will really need to collaborate and do stuff in a more structured way if we're going to fly to the moon if that is actually the kind of level of ambition that we have it's not going to cut it from a technical point of view to do everything in separation to scratch your own itches all the time the internet is actually eating the world it's eating society it's determining how people interact with each other I mean Trump versus when President Trump a Trump's account was taken down on Twitter by some engineer that felt like it and there was no way no way that would happen to a state organization because you could put stuff in place because that is the same account that that guy threatens to foreign heads of state with so that's a pretty strange thing to happen we need society needs an internet that it trusts and if we want to launch this thing we're going to have to collaborate and we have to nurture the right and ethical technologies and well the commission is continuously being pestered by people from industry and citizens saying why don't we have all these big companies in Europe we're a failure we've created packet switching we've created the web, we've created Linux and then we don't have any of these unicorn companies why, why well this is a cuckoo I don't know if people know how that works but if you get ousted of the net all the time because it's an unfair competition and you keep on nurturing the whole system without giving it a second thought if there are too many cuckoos and they're very successful they start consulting business they start houses they start bed and breakfast places put your eggs in and then it's kind of easy to spot it out I mean the real internet is open and the real internet is owned by everybody and if it's not that internet then certainly we can recognize this and we hope that the European commission when they get that billion euros to do stuff they will actually see it that is our funding that is your funding and my eyes opened two years ago when I went to this workshop and there were ten experts and there were no people from the internet world so this was this is your lunch being eaten by people that claim to be you this is actors that try to do the innovation theater and that has to stop so the simple thing is as Sergio has explained it's going to take a little while because we're going to find people that do the awful paperwork for you and then it should be able to get money for the cool stuff and the good stuff that you want to do with very little effort because that's the pledge that they're trying to make and society has paid up the money it's your money it's 500 million Europeans counting on this to happen let's say that everybody puts aside two euros it's more or less the order of magnitude it sounds like a tiny amount but we can actually do amazing things with it I know because I know that people that work for NLNet they sometimes get paid a thousand euros a month to work tirelessly on mind-numbing beautiful technology I know there's a lot of needs and we can scale this up and we need to reinvent this internet because if we don't reinvent it it's maybe lasting for another thousand years and this is not a hyperbowl it's fossilizing really really fast the ossification of the internet is a real problem because if everybody is on it and everybody has a legacy on it it's decades old who's going to change it so with that I leave the floor to Marietje Schaake she's from the European Parliament and she's the one that gets thrown into her lap good morning everybody some ladies, many gentlemen how are you? so in my work as a member of the European Parliament I focus a lot on the question of how to preserve and make more robust the rule of law in an online world some of the areas I work on are trade, foreign policy technology, subjects, digital rights worked on that neutrality we just passed a resolution in the European Parliament that will make it harder to export and to use the surveillance systems to dictatorships where they might be used to violate people's human rights oh thank you and I think that's important for this community we put in a caution to avoid that security researchers and pen testers would be negatively impacted and we call for delisting of export controls encryption software so hopefully well I see it's getting you awake I think it stays that way anyway last week I was in Davos at the World Economic Forum and I can hardly think of a bigger difference between this room and that community of people but what was striking and what I took with me from Davos is actually very interesting that there was a very clear tone of concern about where digitization is heading tectopia was definitely over and the notion that we should put people first, human beings first was a core notion that came across in many of the sessions and it's one that resonates with me deeply and I also thought it was remarkable that Marc Benioff the CEO of Salesforce was actually calling out other CEOs for having failed to take their responsibility in leading big technology companies and essentially called for regulation to safeguard the public interest now why do I say all this one because I thought it was interesting but two because I believe that there is a momentum a momentum building up where there is more attention for the potential negative fallout of privatization of the web everywhere I think one of the deep challenges that we face is that digitization often means privatization and I don't think it serves public interest sufficiently in fact I heard someone from Facebook saying you know what we do at Facebook we are a privately managed public space that certainly raised my eyebrows I don't agree with this obviously I think Facebook is a privately managed private online space and it's especially a profit seeking company which you know it's fine but let's not confuse things how deep the public impact of the behavior of private companies can be and so in thinking about the next generation internet I believe we should really focus on strengthening the public core of the open internet keeping the internet open of course in the first place it's a challenge enough as it is emphasizing how universal rights apply to all of the people all of the time and to see how democracy can be strengthened online I don't think we can overestimate the threats by top down models whether they are authoritarian governance models or profit models that increasingly impact all of us online so when you're building the next generation internet I encourage you to think about governance it is very very important what values you stick in the front and to see what impact it has in the end so again I would really invite you and I hope you will consider strengthening the rule of law online think about values and not just efficiency and speed or I think in this community is not so important but in many other places not just think about profit I would also want to place a bit of a critical note and invite you to be inclusive within your own communities I mean we live in bubbles too much I believe it's very popular to say look politicians don't understand anything about technology and I'm the first one to admit that that's probably true the pace of change of technology is very very rapid there's usually only a subset of politicians deciding on any given topic anyway so you cannot possibly reflect every politician to know everything about every topic what is helpful though is to reach those people that have the most responsibility for changes in the field that you care about and if I change around this assumption I think it is safe to say that a lot of techies geeks, programmers know little to nothing about lawmaking and politics and maybe we should both change maybe we should both be more interested in the other it's very easy to say it's maybe even funny to say that politicians don't understand anything but there are still decision makers and I would suggest that tone really matters saying we think your bureaucratic machine we really don't like you but we like your money I don't know how many people would like to spend their Saturday morning talking about that sort of proposition perhaps it is better to think in terms of solutions and understand that maybe governments in Europe are not perfect European Commission is not perfect governments of our member states are not perfect certainly members of European Parliament are not perfect but maybe actually these people are the best we have they are elected by all of you they also represent your opinion at least hopefully some of them do and so I think it is good to work with them because who else who else besides civil society is protecting the public interest online so in closing even though individuals have been hugely empowered by the use of technology and there is still a lot of promise that has not been manifested and I really hope we can do it together governments and what they do still matters states and what they do still matters they can do a lot of harm but they can also do some good and I think that the EU is in a unique position increasingly think about some of the steps that have been taken on the European level recently we have seen the general data protection regulation we have enshrined net neutrality into EU law competition authorities are finding big tech companies when they are violating competition law as they do with other companies and so the notion that the EU is increasingly a norm setter in the digital space I believe is something that is very essential and that we should all use the EU is increasingly more credible especially compared to the United States unfortunately and compared to regimes where it is not the voice of the people that determines who governs I also think what is quite fundamental that is really in our DNA in Europe is that there is still quite a profound understanding that people deserve to be protected from government too and that is something that we need to underline in everything we do so when we when we go on in tackling new challenges like algorithmic accountability or ethics in artificial intelligence the security of the internet of things et cetera et cetera I think you all can help shape that process I hope you will be invited and participate in shaping the next generation internet not so much by by staying in your own world but really reaching out to others and making sure that this is an inclusive as possible discussion that embraces the public interest of the public internet and manages it in a way that benefits all of the people anywhere in the world, thank you so much we have a few minutes for questions please raise your hand if you have a question hey can I go ahead with a question first of all I want to congratulate you for reaching out and bridging the gaps between our communities I think that's very important as you mentioned and I definitely share some of your concerns about where our digital society is heading but you mentioned some things on how regulation is evolving and my concern is that the more regulation we put, the more we look out the small guys that are trying to build out solutions companies and there's already a lot of regulatory hurdles in European Union because we have so many different countries where people have to basically be careful with all the legislation in these different countries how are we going to be able to regulate the big guys but at the same time make sure that the small people don't have these hurdles to pass through like GDPR while it's good at the same time it's so difficult for small companies to be compliant with it thank you I hope everyone can still hear because it's a kind of challenging setup with people changing rooms and asking questions at the same time but I understood your question clearly so I think indeed creating a level playing field where there can be fair competition and where there can be access and ability to comply for everyone is a key task for us but I wouldn't look at regulation in black and white terms I mean if you think about net neutrality it is deliberately designed to protect smaller startups, individual internet users from the overreach by the huge tech giants and it's it depends on what kind of regulation you're talking about that may have unintended negative consequences for SMEs small and medium size enterprises and I hear you very clearly we must be very careful for that but unfortunately the excuse of a negative impact for SMEs is also often used to stop better principle protection from taking place so for example when I was working on preventing the export of surveillance systems to dictatorships the argument against any regulation I heard most was well it's going to be impossible for the SMEs so it's very good to target exactly what is the problem with smaller players and I agree that it's a legitimate concern instead of making it a sort of blanket argument that can also be abused that would be my reply but I principally agree with what you're saying it's something to be very careful about can I continue on because I'm a bit puzzled between the second and the third presentation I heard something talking about internet of the people and then I hear someone saying that he wants to change the fundamental really no clue what it practically means but what I know is that there is already a lot of people and a lot of communities that are engaged in a lot of amazing projects and that it's not through a directive approach of changing the fundamentals of things that you will embed the people into transforming practices transforming structures and transforming users so the people to be starting from the communities that are already at work and they need to be as diverse as not only technical so this is exactly what we're planning to go with the grain of development to go with the grain of bottom-up innovation rather than to do top-down hyperscaling projects that fail to fund the communities that actually do it