Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The internet, of course we all know, is very, very young right?
But it's so heavily integrated into our daily lives today,
and into the lives of our children.
The internet did not just become critical infrastructure overnight.
When people started using it for their daily livelhoods,
for purchasing things, for moving money around,
it became part of our daily lives just like water is, and electricity.
So there's 1.8 billion people now using it,
and there are issues and pressing needs that need to be solved immediately.
Oh, that's a hard one : What's the first challenge we should meet?
The trouble is we have, you know, five or six that we need to meet
all at once.
The designers in the... I think 70's that designed the IP protocol,
said : Yes, it will grow.
But hey didn't forsee this massive growth that we've seen since the early 90's.
At a certain point, there will be no more IPv4 addresses.
The internet will continue as it currently does.
There is of course a risk for people who do not roll out
the new version of the protocol, that's IPv6.
If we're looking at internet service providers,
I'm happy to say, today, that about 80 percent of them
has plans to roll out IPv6 services in the course of the next year or two.
Something that we start every discussion with,
is stability and security of the internet.
Is the internet at risk? Or the DNS system at risk?
Well, obviously, there are always risks.
We've introduced DNSSEC,as a way of securing the system
to a greater extent.
That had to be done while the system was running.
We at the RIPE NCC have for more than 10 years said :
Oh, we need to deploy DNSSEC, the secure DNS protocol.
I am very happy to see
this is being deployed in the root now, so
there's one headache going away.
We've got a program to allocate new domains at the top level
to compete with .com, and .biz and .aero
So at some point in the next 12 months
there's likely to be the launch of new gTLD's.
So we expect to see, within the next year or so,
.sport or .football or .movie, or dot- you know -
.food, all these other ones coming forward.
How do you ensure
that the grant of new gTLD's is not going to be offensive?
What happens if someone takes
.phoenix, and that's the name of a football club, or a newspaper
or a fishing-you know...
So there's brand name issues there.
I think next to property, privacy is the most challenging issue,
in particular for the individual user.
You know, the internet in many ways reflects society
as we start using it for everything that we do in the physical world.
In real life, you forget, in the virtual life nothing is forgotten.
I think it's useful to understand, for instance,
the concept of the right to be forgotten,
and how that could be implemented on the internet
and what that would mean.
You have forgotten all of this, but Google still remembers.
So one of the paradigms that companies are looking at
is : What is the concept of responsible information management
and governance across these broader eco-systems?
I would propose that Mark Zuckerberg, you know, becomes the initiator
of a facebook parliament where the users elect their representatives
and discuss commonly
what are the rules within a network of 500 million users?
It would benefit from the participation of the major players in the new media,
and Facebook would clearly be one of them.
Whether that's what the CEO needs to do on his day off,
I'm not sure of.
So there is talk in Australia of the government introducing a filter
at the ISP level
to prevent access to what they refer to as illegal material.
But no-one is entirely clear what that actually means.
Freedom of expression is a good reason,
and protection of national security is also a good reason.
But as long as you do not have an independent judiciary,
you have - you know - a lower level of democracy.
Most of the other countries in that box of countries
filter lots and lots of stuff.
This would be filtering a very small amount of stuff,
but that doesn't change the fact that it's still filtering.
And... And anyway it won't work.
The other point is it won't work.
Because people'd just find their way around it, and... yeah.
Restrictions are the exception. The rule is freedom of expression.
And if via a discussion we can organize some pressure
on governments which see the restriction as the rule,
and not as the exceptions,
then this will help and will improve the free flow of information around the globe.
Ask the music industry, ask the software industry, the film industry,
they are very concerned that
if they provide digital services, content in a digital form,
that this is taken away by users who copy their thing
and distribute it for free.
But of course what the internet does instantly
is open a new product or service to a market of 1.8 billion.
So this is part of the new discussion that we have,
that has fundamentally changed the economics.
And so the reward for the monopoly now is proportionally huge.
And so there are people who argue :
Well then the scope of the monopoly should be proportionally reduced.
The East-African Region had been left out in the
so-called internet or information society process.
The current statistic, as of last year
was 3.2 million people having access to the internet.
Only. Out of a population of nearly 40 million.
But the way I see the state of the internet, is
very few of us can afford computers, for example.
So I see most of us accessing the internet perhaps through mobile telephones.
So I see smartphones, for example,
becoming a very important aspect to allow for internet access
in the East-African region.
We are looking at issues of cybercrime,
at the same time looking at universal affordable access.
So you have to deal with the issues at the same time.
While all the others - the Chinese and the Japanese -
are already beginning to talk about internationalized domain names,
we haven't even started to have our own local content,
in our own languages, on the internet.
Today, the internet is still very visible,
because we're still thinking about it,
and we're still building it, and we're still enhancing it.
But it is changing so dramatically,
and it will continue to change dramatically as we move into the mobile world.
It's very possible that the internet will remain just as critical as it is,
but it will almost be invisible to us.
Because we are going to take it for granted
in a way that is integrated into our lives, rather than being visible to us.