In discussing where we went wrong, a panel of luminaries, including Vint Cerf and the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle, sees three Cs: centralization, copyright, and competition.
The person who helped invent the internet, another who works to make it the world’s memory, one who advocates to keep it open, and a fourth who chronicled some of its bigger transformations met on a stage in Washington to talk about the state and fate of the web.
Their banter was less bubbly than you might have expected from the title of this event hosted by the Foundation for American Innovation: Wayback to the Future: Celebrating the Open Web.
Attendees heard mainly concerns from these luminaries: TCP/IP co-author and Google’s «Chief Internet Evangelist» Vint Cerf, Internet Archive founder and director Brewster Kahle, Electronic Frontier Foundation executive director Cindy Cohn, and Ars Technica co-founder Jon Stokes.
Seated below racks of analog storage—the old books in the shelves of Georgetown University’s ceremonial Riggs Library—they spoke about the policy choices that have already closed off so much of the web’s potential and could close more of it still.’The Golden Goose Is the Connectivity’
The first risk to come up in the discussion was fragmenting the internet.
«The North Star in this system is that everything should be able to connect to everything else», Cerf said. «That openness is really vital to the utility of the internet.»
Without getting into examples like Russia testing a complete cutoff of the global internet to wall off dissent or US states imposing age restrictions on social media that have led some platforms to block those states, Cerf warned against departing from the internet’s open foundation. «The golden goose is the connectivity, and if they kill that they will have a problem», he said.
Stokes, who left Ars in 2012 and is now co-founder, president, and CPO at AI content-management firm Symbolic.ai) then brought up the peer-to-peer apps he used to write about.
«There was kind of an alternate path that we could have taken», he said, blaming «incumbent interests» in copyright and telecom that were not fond of the idea that «I’m going to host my own files on my laptop and serve them globally across the internet and you won’t have control.
