The Internet in 2020? – PL 05 2010
30 April 2010 | 15:30-16:15
Programme overview 2010
Key issues that could be discussed: How will the Future Internet with cyber-physical networks, cloud computing, other technologies and associated new services affect our daily lives? How will content be produced and exchanged in 2020? How will consumers access and use information? How will users communicate with each other? What challenges for human rights, rule of law and democracy? What will be the business opportunities? How will the public value of the Internet evolve?
People
Key Participants
- João Barros, Director of Carnegie Mellon-Portugal Program, Portugal
- Ilias Chantoz, Symantec Government Relations – EMEA and APJ
- Oliver M.J. Crepin Leblond, ISOC England/EURALO/GIH Ltd
- Wolfgang Kleinwächter, University of Aarhus, Chair of the Council of Europe Internet Expert Group
- Yuliya Morenets, TaC – Together against Cybercrime Representative
- Ana Cristina Neves, Knowledge Society Agency, Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education Head International Relations
Moderator
- João Barros, Carnegie Mellon-Portugal Program, Portugal
Rapporteur
- Yuliya Morenets, TaC - Together against Cybercrime
Remote participation moderator
[tbd]
Key messages
There is a need make sure that we keep the Internet user-centric, supporting the end-to-end principle so as for it to constitute no barriers to innovation. Europe’s “systemic barrier” to the Internet’s growth is baggage which has to be abandoned in favour of change. The protection of critical infrastructure and the issue of data distribution and their transfer are key issues that need to be addressed.
Messages (extended)
Important projects have been developed for future Internet devices that take the form of a cognitive assistant (US Military Data Glove, DARPA’s PAL – Personal Assistant that Learns, CALO – Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organises).
We know that the Internet of the future will support a lot more devices. What we don’t know is exactly what future Internet services will be in place in 2020.
As a result, we need make sure that we keep the Internet user-centric, supporting the end-to-end principle so as for it to constitute no barriers to innovation. Europe’s “systemic barrier” to the Internet’s growth is baggage which has to be abandoned in favour of change.
In the future, there will probably be a proliferation of information. The Internet network will be a tool of concentration of information. The question of the protection of critical infrastructure therefore appears. It also engenders military interest in this infrastructure. It will be a question of cyber commands and cyber defence.
It would be interesting to raise the possibility of multistakeholders’ war. Will we have the fragmentisation of the Internet?
We will need to answer the question of data distribution and their transfer in the future. It will be also the concern of their hosting and the location. How to find the data? Will it be a real service?
Our society does not need to create barriers to innovation in order to go forward and in order to focus not only on the dark side of the progress, but also and especially on the bright side of it.
Transcript
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>> JOAO BARROS: Good afternoon, and welcome to the last fanatic session. This time we’ll be talking about Internet 2020. My name is Joao Barros, an Associate Professor with the University of Portugal and also with the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program, a Portuguese initiative that gathers the expertise of nine different universities, many research institutions, 39 companies, and Carnegie Mellon University, targeting focus areas of future Internet services and technologies.
And today it’s my pleasure to moderate this panel. I have to confess, it’s the first time that I have to fight against coffee break, but we will succeed, and the reason I am confident we will succeed is that we have an outstanding panel of speakers. Our reporter today will be Yuliya Morenets, with an organization called Together Against Cybercrime based in France, where she is also a professor, and she works also with the Council of Europe on topics related to cybercrime.
Next we have Ilias Chantoz, a lawyer specialized in IT law, and has been working for more than ten years now in security both with the European Commission and also with Simon Tech.
We have next Alberto from Telefonica research in Barcelona. He is with Internet systems and networking group. He holds a degree from – and a PhD from Columbia University. He is also an adjunct Professor.
And at the far end on the left, we have Oliver Crepin Leblond. He has a PhD in digital communications from Imperial College in London and the founder of Global Information Highway Limited. He is in close cooperation with ICANN and ISOC.
I have to confess that when I was first approached to discuss the topic of Internet 2020, I was rather puzzled because the truth is I don’t know how the Internet is going to look like next week, let alone ten years from now. However, what we can do is to pose a number of – give you a number of educated guesses and try to foresee what will be either an evolution or a revolution in terms of how so many different heterogeneous networks and systems will come together in a global network that was surely not going to be a network of content or a network of information as we like to see it and as the previous session showed, but will be a network also of actuators and sensors and systems and machines that communicate with each other more and more without human intervention.
It’s only right to ask what are all these machines talking about. Well, they are probably regulating buildings, organizing intelligent transportation systems, powering up plants, lowering other consumptions of water, for example, and all these critical infrastructures are together networked in and operating in a way that requires distributed control and, obviously, public policies that are aimed not just at regulating communications, but also regulating control traffic that will ultimately impact our everyday life.
At the same time, questions such as what is reality in the sense that if we’re all immersed in the Internet in the virtual world at the same time that we are in the real world with so many distractions, are we still liable for what we do? Perhaps we are not intoxicated by alcohol, but we’re surely intoxicated by information, by virtual environments, by immersive technologies that will soon be projecting information that is available on the Web, images that are available on the Web, on our real world. What does this mean for education? What does this mean for our children? What are opportunities, but also, what are threats? All of those are questions that we want to discuss in about ten minutes. No, it will be a little bit more than that, but we are pressed on time.
So I would like to ask Oliver to show us some slides he prepared. In fact, he seems to have found a very original strategy anticipating what is next on the Internet, so I would like to ask Oliver to talk about that.
>> OLIVER M.J. CREPIN LEBLOND: I had absolutely no idea what we would find on the Internet in 2020, so the first thing I did was look inside my plastic bottle, which I took as a glass bowl or crystal bowl, but couldn’t find anything either. So the next thing I thought was, well, the U.S. military and the ARPA – DARPA, defensive research projects agency, knew – had some kind of idea of what kind of network they were going to build 40 years ago, so maybe now they had some sort of idea what they want to build 20 years or 10, 20 years from now.
So the first thing I did was go over to the website and had a look at what the U.S. military is doing, and I hope that the slide is going to come up.
Next slide, please.
And so the first thing I saw, I came across, was a thing called the robo troop, which is a sort of contraption that you will probably find in Terminator or some kind of futuristic film, but for some reason, they’re actually working on this quite seriously, and the whole outfit actually includes what they call a data glove, which provides them with an always-on information device where they can find out about the enemy, about – well, they can actually issue orders with it.
>> Can we see the next slide, please?
>> OLIVER M.J. CREPIN LEBLOND: I can’t see – okay. Here we go. Now you can see the chap not looking too friendly, but has got the data glove in there which looks like quite a nice thing to play around with. You can control aircraft remotely, access cameras, but similarly, your commanders can have a look through your Webcam at what you’re seeing and also find out your vital statistics and exactly where you are. Of course, one of the conditions of that is that everyone is going to be directly accessible, so the U.S. military has gotten a rather large allocation of IPv6 addresses, so that’s one of the ideas why we should move to IPv6, I guess.
The next thing is the Advanced Research Projects Agency. If we could go on to the next slide. You’ve got two projects which have caught my attention. One is the personal assistant that learns, and that’s quite an interesting thing. It’s a PDA, which a little bit like the owl in quantum leap was using to try and interrogate his assistant or his computer. It’s a system which actually acts as a cognitive assistant, so it learns what you want, what you don’t want through using it, and it will actually take care of all sorts of tasks which might have taken humans to do it before but were rather repetitive.
And of course, for military situations, when you’ve got a terrain of operation with a lot of different parameters coming your way, a flood of information coming in, a flood of information that you want to send out, you want this information to be streamlined and to work – to all work well and go to the right people and the right location.
The second project, which is actually part of the PAL project, is the committed assistant that learns and organizes, and that helps in decision making. The interesting thing here is that it learns, so we really are going towards artificial intelligence, but the U.S. military and DARPA are working very hard on this.
Of course, every military application – or some military applications might have a civilian move to them after that, and so it’s very difficult for us to think, well, how we will be able to use such devices. I’m sure maybe some of you have good ideas of what we will be able to do, but there are some things that we know and some things we don’t know.
If we can have the next slide, please. What we know is there will be a lot of device-to-device traffic, which means that on top of all the traffic that we’re going to generate, devices will generate traffic, and so the infrastructure has to develop enough to support this, and that, again, you know, IPv6 and a whole lot of other investments which will need to be made for this. What we don’t know exactly is what the communication standards will be like and what the future services are going to be in order to be – are going to be implemented in those days.
So what we actually need is something that is a user-centric Internet which respects the end-to-end principle and constitutes no barrier to innovation. And in effect, the important thing in there is that you shouldn’t start having a system to restrict one type or another type of traffic on the net which will slow down innovation, or basically, the Internet should remain as it is as far as innovation is concerned and how it should move forward.
There is one thing, though, and a lot of organizations and a lot of governments are worried about this, is that the Internet is taking such a big part of our life and is becoming so important in our life that it’s going to change a lot of things. And there’s one thing we shouldn’t be afraid of change.
If we can have the next slide, please. And one day we’ll be able to get presentations to work as well.
Okay. Well, I can tell you without the slide, I guess. Basically, horse-drawn carriages are history. The history of horse-drawn carriages is in the 19th century, up to the 19th century, there was a huge industry revolving around – transportation was basically done on horse-drawn carriages, so you had horses, blacksmiths, so on. When the motor car came up, it was totally wiped out in a matter of a few years.
So today, my belief is there’s a systemic barrier to the Internet growth, and the systemic barrier means that the laws and processes which are in place today are designed to safeguard what is currently in place, and this really creates a lot of baggage which, in some cases, will have to be ditched, and if we don’t get rid of some of this baggage or if we don’t allow this baggage to go and be replaced by something new, the market will dictate it. And so if the market dictates it, it will try to find change elsewhere, and that’s definitely what we don’t want. That’s it. Thank you very much.
>> JOAO BARROS: All right. Thank you very much. All right. All right. So let me lower the volume again. So Alberto, does Telefonica research look to the U.S. military when they’re thinking about the Internet of the future?
>> Well, not that I am aware of.
(Laughter)
But what I want to talk a little bit is about some of the changes you were mentioning. I want to talk a little bit about the technical challenges we face and how can we confront them from these ten next years.
So if we look at the Internet, how it evolved in the last ten years, when we realized it was successful, people started thinking about whether the current infrastructure was enough to support its growth; right? And it was pretty soon clear that the way it was, just based on basic communication networks, it was not going to be like this, so after 25 years of research, it’s interesting, someone said that at least we have learned one thing that will make Internet grow, and it is the use of caches. In 25 years, we learned that caches were good to scale.
Even with this, things are not okay. If you look at things like the 9/11 attacks or even the death of Michael Jackson, you see that there’s still a lot of problem with people trying to access content, and the Internet is not able to support that. Things are only going to get worse.
In the last four years, it’s been reported there is a sixfold increase in the amount of data that the Internet is covering up to the level of this year of something like 1,000 exabytes of data. If you consider, for example, every single spoken word in the human history would take probably 15 exabytes of data – and I’m sure the people who did this number didn’t take my mother into account, but in any case – it’s a significant amount of data that is being carried out.
So now, in all this history, what we have seen is that we’re playing this cat-and-mouse game. Now the problems appear, people are starting to redesign what is going to happen next. And what I want to pinpoint now is three main technological changes and how the discussion now, whether it’s revolution or evolution, how in ten years we’re going to see these three problems solved in hopefully a revolutionary way.
There are three things we are going to be seeing if there’s a revolution. So the very first problem that I think is pretty important – and I’m going to focus mostly in conat any time distribution – is how to find the content on the Internet. So it’s pretty clear that the Internet was designed on the where and not on the whats. So we named the hosts, we name the content, we name the files, but we don’t name the data, and this is creating a lot of problems for people now to find the content; right? It’s creating consistency problems, it’s creating security problems, it’s creating – take, for example, search. Search is based on links. Links point where the content is. Now, if your content moves from one place to another, not only you would probably not be able to find the content, but also the semantic of the search is probably going to change.
And you have a lot of other problems. For example, authentication, liability of the data, right, all these kind of things, right now pose various problems that need to be addressed.
Now, if we look at how to handle this content in an evolutionary way, we can say, okay, we have peer to peer. We’ve learned a lot over the years about what peer to peer can do. We’ve learned to manage a large amount of data. If we could solve the problem, for example, we could envision every single website in the future is going to be peer to peer. Why not? But if we go to the revolutionary approach, hopefully, the last three years, there’s been a new way of thinking trying to make content a first-class citizen on the Internet.
Internet content was trying to say let’s try to name the content. Let’s try to look for the content, not where the content is. And let’s make the content self-certified. Let’s not secure the communication channels; let’s secure the content itself. So it will be authentication and traceability, and we don’t need to worry where this is.
If you put this everywhere on the network, not only data centers but every single point, and you don’t care where the content is located, many of these problems can be solved, and maybe you can have Internet, right now, instead of having this simple bad version of search that is called routing, we can have a truly real search, and we can do things like, okay, give me every single file that is similar to this other file or give me everything that is related to this other thing.
So that’s for locating the content; right?
The other problem is how to distribute this content. I’m not going to talk much about this. I’m just going to say that it’s pretty clear now that Internet, the way it is now, is not able to handle all the data that’s being distributed. In fact, many – much of the data that has been distributed in the world goes to the physical world, not the electronic worlds. If you take things like NetFlix or things like data center backups, these things go through the postal service. These things go through FedEx. They don’t go through the Internet. And the reason is the Internet was created with traffic communication in mind. It was not thinking about bulk transfer with delay.
If we want to handle huge amount of data as we are going to be doing, maybe the solution, looking at what the physical world is doing, looking at FedEx and these companies that have solved this problem in the physical world for a long time; right? So maybe we can start thinking about putting a little bit of delay into place, putting a lot of storage everywhere, and maybe we will have to live with that if we want to make a huge amount of data distributed.
And finally, the final problem that I want to discuss what will be a revolutionary approach in ten years’ time is something very pressing, something very pleasant as well. It’s the where to host this data. So right now, hosting is not the real problem because so far, the Googles of the world have been able to hold all this data, but but they are holding this data on huge data centers with thousands of computers drawing on tens of megawatts of power. This is obviously not sustainable and has a lot of implications on the environment and also security.
So what I want to argue in this revolutionary approach is the same economic scale that made the huge create of supercomputers being split into small computers and being placed in these data centers is going to happen again and is going to split these data centers and is going to distribute it across the whole world. Distribute it in what we like to call these nanodata centers. These nano data centers are going to be everywhere. Every single piece of computing power with some storage that will be distributed in the world is going to be part of these nano data centers. I’m not talking about not only the routers on your computer, I’m talking about your cell phones, the set-top boxes, Tivos. These things, they will draw power locally and be able to dissipate a hit much more efficiently, and there is a paradigm shift in now the communication is not how to solve it within the data center but how to solve it across these points which have distributed all across the world.
And in order to solve this communication, I guess that we’ll have to go and look into the social networks, right, because social networks, as it is, they help us at least now to predict much more accurately where the data is going to be demanded from. Data’s not only now pull or push, there is a cascade that can be predicted from the interest of where people is moving and where the social movement is moving.
These things, location, distribution, and placement of the data are big challenges that hopefully will be solved revolutionary and with the constraint of making green and also with the help of social networks.
>> JOAO BARROS: All right. So Oliver gave us a number of applications that might be coming. On the other hand, Alberto emphasized architectural concerns of how can the Internet architecture evolve to support many of these applications, in particular the larger and larger quantities of data that we have to deal with. But the Internet basically grows organically. It’s very much like an ecosystem where you plant flowers, but a lot of weeds and other things grow, and it’s hard to control. The role of government as a gardener is very difficult, and there are all sorts of threats, not just opportunities. Ilias, how can we take care of this garden?
>> ILIAS CHANTOZ: Hello, everyone, and thank you for the opportunity to participate today. I have been listening to my colleagues with a lot of interest, actually. I am not going to pretend I know where the Internet will go, but I will say a few things about where I think the threats will go. Actually, I am going to try to make an educated guess about where the threats will go, and I’ll try to do that guess based on what we know till now.
It’s interesting because what we heard also from the models, either from Oliver or the colleague from Telefonica, doesn’t really change substantially my perception as to what the threat is likely to be. We heard about the robo soldier, the guy with a gun, little bit of terminator, whatever you want to call it. We are talking about warfare, sorry, cyber defense and information-centric warfare, the capability to utilize the network as a tool for information collection, intelligence collection, and also a concentration of fire power and forces coordination has been there for a while. I would go even as far as to say has actually been used in existing military conflicts.
Back in 2007, the NATO created the Cyber Defense and Management Authority. They’re well-known policies and countries that have even established cyber commands in an effort to address not just lands, sea, air, space, but also cyber as a potential form of battlefield.
So will we see activity in the area pertaining to critical infrastructure and national security that would be of military interest in the future? I strongly believe that. Absolutely yes. There’s no doubt about that. You can use that for intelligence collection, you can use it for psychological operations. You can use it to disable the infrastructure of the opponent. You can even use it for power projection. So on all these concepts, if I touch the military, the hard-core military side, yeah, all that is possible. Frankly, some of it is being done already today.
So if I look at it from a user centric and end to end, the discussion about the principles, well, I would say that Symantec, of who is the government affairs from Europe and Asia I’m in charge of, very much subscribes to the notion of openness, competitiveness, open standards, end-to-end principle. However, we also need to be realistic, meaning I said I’m responsible for government relations, which means I understand politics or I’m supposed to, anyhow. And something which is so important for national security can sometimes be difficult to be kept open, completely unregulated, completely out of control.
There will be areas that government will want to exercise jurisdiction, and we see that happening already.
From my end, what I would certainly want to make sure to see is that the Internet become – remains opening and allows innovation and the wealth that has given us till now, but at the same time, I think we need to be realistic of the national issues.
You talk about baggage, Oliver. I’m interested in that. I find a number of, let’s say, regulatory issues as falling within the definition of baggage. I think that we’re going to be challenged with backage in many ways. Why? Because we feel comfortable about the backage. We know them. They work well in the physical world.
We’re discussing right now in Europe about how we’re going to review the data protection directive, 95-46. You know what? I’m feeling very comfortable about the 95-46 directive. I know how it works and how to apply it in the physical world. The problem with that, in 1995, there was no Internet.
If I look at it from the other side, meaning the Telefonica model, actually, if I’m going to have somebody search for content on my PC, well, guess what? Actually, the privacy of that PC is very important to me. Or if that someone is going to distribute some of his content on my PC, especially if that content happens to be child pornography, I have an issue with that too. So I’m not going to see nano data centers, big data centers, small – I don’t know what I’m going to see or how the data centers are going to look like.
What I do know is we’re going to see a lot more information on the cloud. What I do know is we are going to see a lot more virtualization. What I do absolutely certainly know is we are going to see a proliferation of information. I agree with Telefonica in the amount of data massively increases – doubles, in fact – every year.
As a result of that, just this year, we stopped 100 attacks per second. Not happened. We stopped. Meaning we saw them and we stopped them. I’m not talking about those you didn’t see because you weren’t our customer or we didn’t see because we didn’t see and you got through. So think about it, hundred attacks per second at any given moment every day for this last year.
So if this is the kind of threat we’re seeing, we’re going to see a lot more targeted attacks and a lot more attacks aiming at information and a lot more attacks aiming at infrastructure. Why? Because there’s national security and trust involved, obviously, but also because there’s a very big financial motivation behind it. The information we have in social networks, in credit cards, everything, is money. And unfortunately, just as where the thieves go to the banks to rob them, in the Information Society, will have also their incidents because hacking is no longer for fame; it’s for fortune.
>> JOAO BARROS: Thank you very much, Ilias, for this guided tour in the dark side of the force.
Before opening discussion, at least for a few minutes, I would like to introduce our speaker. Wolfgang Kleinwachter is a Professor of International communication policy at the international of our husband. Wolfgang, to you share Ilias’s concerns?
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: Yeah, thank you very much, and I want to be brief. We have in Germany good word which says even – in the good old times, even the future looked better. So the question is if we look into the future, will it be better or even worse? And I share a lot of the concerns which has been expressed by the previous speaker.
Certainly, in the year 2020, we will have probably 5 billion Internet users. That means everybody on the globe is just one click away. Our friends and our enemies, preachers, cyber criminals are all in our direct neighborhood, and this could be good, could be also bad. Certainly we are going to have a lot of more applications, we have more devices, it will be mobile, broadband. All this is more or less known.
But let me speak a little bit also about the dark side and how I see it. First thing is do we see – do we experience the fragmentation of the Internet? I think the world of fragmentation, as some people coined it, the – of the Internet. Will this happen? Partly, you know, I would say yes because if it gets so big, then probably, you know, it will – I would not say collapse, but it will create certain special islands. You know, we know the Internet is a network of networks. What I see is the emergence of networks within the Internet or networks which are linked to the Internet.
I think already what we’re seeing with the domain name system, so nobody knows what really the consequences are. This could be easy, the case that, you know, a big country with a special system of characters in their language, you know, starts their own route and operates, you know, an own Internet, which is linked probably, you know, just one bridge to the Internet as we know it. But it means then you have an island within the Internet, and you can leave this island only if you have a password, and probably you will get the password only under certain conditions, and you have to renew the password to leave your island, you know, if your behavior was correct in the last year. I think this is – this is an opportunity, and some people could say, okay, we use this opportunity.
The other thing is, you know, what will happen with the social networks, other islands within the network. So Facebook has now 400 million people. The question is how does this govern? Do we need a Facebook governance? What about the civil society within Facebook? Do they want to participate in policy development for Facebook? Because if you are on Facebook, then you know, more or less you are in a closed shop, and probably we see a lot of us social networks where we have new big powers, like Facebook.com is one big country, then we have smaller country which is .de or something like that. People identify them in this network, and they ignore the rest of the Internet because they live in this community, and they have also their classroom, and if they go elsewhere, then probably they have to ask for permission if they want to take that data to another place.
>> JOAO BARROS: You can switch off Facebook, but you can’t switch off Spain, for example.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: Okay. That’s a good point. The other thing is we saw the Internet in last years always as an enabling technology, but what we see now is new applications and devices, it’s partly disabled the end user. So you are put in a box and allowed only to do what is there. And the next billion users will not be the active users. A lot of passive users will come to the Internet, which have this television behavior, lean back to become entertained.
And though there will be a new opportunity for the middleman who says, okay, you are stupid. I’ll settle your problems. There is no need. You are active. Here you have the service. Pay for the service. And this will disable, partly, the end user. So this means what was the driving force for the last years, what was mentioned in the previous session, innovation without permission. That means you expect all the powers, people were active, created, created. Some people are not interested to be active. They are not interested to be creative.
And so this is a good market opportunity for other people to say, okay, I put you in this box, so this is not anyone enabling technology. Then it has a risk that it becomes disabling, that you have less opportunities. And I say in particular the military and security things, you know, cyber warm is an option. You have – war is an option. You have seen it already. Hopefully the world remains peaceful, but if we enter into difficult conflicts, probably we will see a new form of war, and probably multistakeholder war, that the industry will be part of the war. Also probably civil society, citizens will say, okay, I create some harm for the enemy. So that means probably it’s not only the government which has the war, it is a very distributed war. This is my last word.
Thank you.
>> JOAO BARROS: I see Ilias shaking his head. Why are you shaking your head?
>> ILIAS CHANTOZ: Where do you want me to start? Industry participating in the world. Let’s take a war we are familiar with, World War II. Last time I checked, it was the government – also, last time I checked, it was the allies bombing German factories. It’s not a question of dangerous territory, it’s a question of stating the facts, historical facts.
I like the Internet, I work in technology. As you said when you were reading out the bio, I have been ten years in this sector. But we should not treat this as being something completely new, as being something completely exotic, as being something that we’ve never seen before.
Already, back in 420 already 430 BC, it was explained how history actually repeat itself and how if you study history, you’ll not do the same mistakes. We are being enabled to do different things from the technology, but the basics of politics, the basics of history, and the basics of warfare haven’t really changed that much.
>> JOAO BARROS: Point well taken. Oliver, do you agree?
>> OLIVER M.J. CREPIN LEBLOND: Somewhat, but I’m concerned about the fact we are spending so much time on cyberwar. The difference is in cyberwar, you can unplug, and in real world, you can’t. So we shouldn’t really be that concerned.
>> But the Internet is a distributed system, Alberto.
>> ALBERTO TOLEDO: Right. The point I am trying to make – I’m not sure if I understood. So Internet, per se, you say that could be a disabler, right, but I don’t really agree. Internet is there. It’s enabled. People want to be in a different, you know, network, connected or not, that’s fine. So the technology is there. The potential is there.
>> JOAO BARROS: One sentence, Wolfgang.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: To be more precise, not the technology disables, but the services which are probably offered, you know, do not stimulate, let’s say, innovation and creativity.
>> But the services are made by the people.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: Right, but it means – and the Internet could become like TV, passive consumer and active –
>> JOAO BARROS: All right. Now is our time to empower and enable the people, so you, the people – we’ve heard so far. Does anyone wish to –
>> One more thing. So human beings are stupid, fine. That is not the Internet’s fault.
>> JOAO BARROS: All right. Internet 2020. Comments? Questions?
>> Come on.
>> JOAO BARROS: Yes. Just use my microphone.
>> Okay. I will. It works. Very brief comment because I like what you mentioned, that cyberwar you can plug out. Can you plug it out? Can you plug out egovernance systems? Can you plug out any – can you plug out Internet now? What do we do if you plug it out? We are becoming so dependent on Internet that I’m not sure any of these features in the next years will be able to just plug out. Physically, yes, but the consequences would be huge.
>> JOAO BARROS: Ilias, quick statement.
>> ILIAS CHANTOZ: If you plug out because of a cyberwar, that means you lost it; right? If you plug out, it means that you are being disconnected, that effectively, your ability to share information, to communicate to your own forces, and to communicate with your critical infrastructure is lost.
Now, I’m a bit concerned because I’m focusing too much on the military, though, and frankly, I wanted to agree with what Alberto was saying also about the part that has to do with the choices of people. I have also the right not to participate. I have the right to watch television and choose to watch television as opposed to use the Internet.
When it comes also to the point about not creating or sharing content or the services not being available, that’s the whole notion of competition. If the services are not know very well and I am an intelligent customer, I will not use them.
>> JOAO BARROS: Does the Internet have a quality in itself that we do not need to actually worry about the innovative aspects if we just trust the users? That’s the statement or the question to some extent. Other comments? Yes. And the microphone’s already here.
>> Sorry. David Hutchison, and the information from the panel has been very interesting, but the tone that comes from it, the language is quite negative, even if you’re talking about innovation, it’s in a negative manner. And apart from the rather frightening visions of cyberwar and various things, do you have a belief that there is positive innovation that can be achieved, that can provide benefits to civil society, to governance, to any of these areas, and come away, possibly, from the negative stuff?
>> JOAO BARROS: Yes.
>> I have been talking about the dark side, so I guess I should be the first to go on innovation and the positive stuff. Absolutely, the short answer is. That’s why I began talking about virtualization, about cloud computing, and this is why I said I want to avoid sticking to the doom-and-gloom scenario.
Every society attracts a degree of criminality, a degree of conflict. That’s the nature of politics. But apart from that, all this innovation is driving growth, is driving development, is driving services. This is why I said from the very beginning we strongly believe in the end-to-end principle and we strongly believe in the competitive nature of it.
I guess I try to be also realistic and somewhat moderate because I see my daily job the effort that the government control is there, and for some, let’s say, democratic society, certainly legitimate. And on the other hand, I do also get to see the dark side. But the vast majority of the Internet is driving growth, is driving innovation, and frankly, from this innovation – because Symantec doesn’t just do security; it does data availability – so from the availability of data, the support, the back-end is what we make profit from, so absolutely.
>> JOAO BARROS: All right. Before I go back to the panel, there are three people who would like to speak and just ask you to be brief, and I will just put your statements together, please.
>> Hi. The first thing is probably the ubiquity, like ubiquitous wireless cloud access in whatever place, form, or whatever. I share the notion that this is a vision that is much too negative. I would like, for instance, that we share a collective vision of this kind of ubiquitous access, single roaming worldwide. I get a subscription in one country, I go anywhere in the world and I don’t pay an additional cent. That’s one thing.
The second thing is we might get a development of peer filtering. The social networks today provide a grid and a graph or multiple graphs that will be probably used in the future as a filtering mechanism for recommendation things. And going in the direction that Wolfgang was mentioning, I anticipate ahypertrophia of the thumb because basically, people will be doing just yes, yes, yes, yes, and the goal of all companies – to transform any movement of the thumb into any kind of cash registering machine sound. The word was said history repeat itself. History doesn’t repeat itself. It reams. The thing is there are patterns that are emerging. The problems we’re facing are more or less the same; however, there are sometimes pressures. The kind of problems we will be facing are not necessarily bad.
They bring new things. They bring organization, social organization at the global level. And one of the challenges is our dependency on a certain number of things. And it’s not only about the Internet. It’s also about the computing power that is attached to Internet.
If you think about it, the financial crisis is the lack of control, is the loss of control by humans on the machines they created to organize trading on the faster speed than the one they can handle themselves. And the feedback loops that are in those systems are providing dynamic effects that we are not always able to control. So understand better the complex dynamics of the things we are creating is a challenge. It’s not a danger because those feedbacks will be very positive in some cases. But the dynamics of the increase of computing power and communications, it’s the combination of the two, and what is the digital society that will be so dependent on all those networks but, at the same time, will liberate us, hopefully, from a lot of tasks that we don’t want to do?
>> JOAO BARROS: All right. Thank you very much. Next statement?
>> Hi. My name is Bernard, social media consultant. I must agree with Bertrand. We are talking too negatively. I would like to see – from a personal point of view, I would like to see – that’s how I see the Internet. I don’t know if you have done any research about this, if you can tell us more, if you can enlighten us on how this is going, because that’s how I see the future of the Internet. Thank you.
>> JOAO BARROS: And here.
>> Hi, everyone. I would like to give a positive notion to look a little more brighter into the future, 2020. Once we all know, like all parts of society, like young people, old people, people in between, like when we know how to treat this medium, how to use it, we can reveal ITS full potential, like in one full and creative way. Like taking the challenges in 2020 and beyond in terms of e-participation, in terms of offline participation, learning, crossing borders, like all these wonderful stuff we will do, and this new technology, once we explore it wonderful, it will help so much to make life easier in general. So thank you.
>> JOAO BARROS: All right. On this positive tone, one last statement from each one of the panelists, then I will ask Yuliya to summarize our discussion. I’ll start with Oliver.
>> OLIVER M.J. CREPIN LEBLOND: That was a lot faster than I was expecting. I do feel sometimes the Internet is evolving so fast that we do seem always to be running behind on the governance side of things.
But to keep positive and a bit sort of as a contrast to what I mentioned earlier, I think change is good, and I think that we should be looking towards reforming or some changes in our society and the way our institutions are run and the way some companies are run, the way some business models are run, and we should not be scared of it. It’s a wonderful opportunity for the future.
>> JOAO BARROS: All right. Gang.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: One thing is for sure. It’s not the Internet that brings the bad things into our life. It’s the bad things into the world which now have made its way over into the Internet. I think it’s important that the Internet is a mirror of our society, and if we are unsatisfied with the Internet, we should be unsatisfied with the society and improve the society, and we will improve the Internet.
Certainly, if there is a dark side, there is a bright side, and it’s sometimes important to have, you know, alarm bell and saying here are the risks. Be careful. We can do it better. And I think a forum like this one, EuroDIG is a good place to give wake-up calls and say to a broader public, there is risks. Nothing is taken for granted. So the Internet has not to be or – you know, there is a risk. The freedoms and all the possibilities and opportunities we have, there’s no guarantee this will continue forever. So it is the result of human activity, and it’s our responsibility to keep the Internet free, open for everybody, innovative, and good for the five or six billion people who will seen join the Internet.
>> JOAO BARROS: Maybe not just a mirror but actually an amplifier to some extent. Ilias.
>> ILIAS CHANTOZ: This is probably the first time I’ll agree with Wolfgang, that yes, yes, it is exactly what you said. The Internet is a mirror of human society.
I was in a meeting yesterday, somebody said that he is optimist because he doesn’t have enough information. I am optimist, but I certainly do have enough information. As I said, I do believe that nothing is for granted, but at the same time, I do agree with all of the things thaw said about the fact that we need to recognize also the positive aspects. We recognize the positive aspects. As I said, the Internet has been an engine for growth and will continue to be that engine for the years to come. But at the same time, we’ll need to know also what are the challenges that we’re going to face in order to ensure that we can continue this growth and be ready to tackle them head on.
>> JOAO BARROS: Alberto, will we be ready?
>> ALBERTO TOLEDO: So maybe I have too naive version of this; right? To me, Internet – the same as in society, maybe that’s why I’m naive – I see the positive things overwhelmingly more than the negative things. I am a scientist, so I couldn’t be doing my job without the Internet. I would not be able to talk to millions of people. Now I can have 1.5 million followers. I can tell anyone what I want, I can find anything I want, and now, social networks, we have a tool in which things will come to us and we can also influence people.
Okay. There’s bad things, but I am – in 2020, it will still have bad things, but we’ll still be winning. So I don’t know.
>> JOAO BARROS: Yuliya, you have the last word.
>> YULIYA MORENETS: Thank you, Joao. I would like to just say something about – and from the social point of view. We think and we believe that in the coming ten years, actually, they get between the end users and expert level, and the end users will become – will be in the center and will have central not only in using ICT and Internet, but also in the oligatory process. That’s what I wanted to add to this discussion.
Now I go to the summary. We have a big number of questions that was raised, and I propose the general lines that will be developed more in details in the final report.
So the first line is due to the number of projects that are developed today, will the society be regulated by machines, sensors, connective assistants, and that will be used for military purposes and that will move to the whole society. The Internet may even regulate the vital infrastructure.
The second line is with the proliferation of information, is the question of protection of critical information will appear, and also the military interest for this infrastructure. It’s also the question of cyber crimes and cyber defense. Also the discussion of multistakeholder war.
The third line, in the question of data in the future, how to find data. Will it be a real service? It’s a question of the transfer of this data and of their hosting.
So – and I will end in quoting the last line that we don’t need barriers to innovation in order to go forward and in order to have not only the dark side but also the bright side.
So thank you.
>> JOAO BARROS: All right. I’m authorized to say that remote participants express support for Wolfgang’s points that the RP in EuroDIG has shown this positive side and this progress towards inclusion that is happening in the MS processes. If you know the acronyms, you will know what this is about.
So my last point to you, thank you very much. I apologize for not having been able to include the remote participants to the extent that I would like to, but given the time constraints, I think that the discussion was definitely fast and productive. So thank you very much to all our speakers, and enjoy the end of EuroDIG. Thank you.
(Applause)