Computerworld - March 26, 2012

Continued from page 14

on the internet,
it’s really hard to
tell if you’ve done
the equivalent
of ending up in a bad
neighborhood.

what do you see as the biggest benefit of the internet? Hooking people together, intermediated by computing; hooking people to information, intermediated by a computer. In the early days, we thought we were hooking people to computers. I remember in the days of Arpanet, when email emerged, the people doing the funding said we shouldn’t be doing something like email; we should really be focused on hooking people to high-power computing. But to me, [the benefit] is this intermediation of people getting to information and to each other. The computer is just the platform that makes some of this happen.

what do you see as the most troubling aspects of the internet today?

The Internet is a fairly general platform, so all kinds of things can happen there, including good things and bad things. The issue we’re dealing with today is, how do we police and control the bad things without impairing the good things? This is a problem that has a technical engineering component but also has a very social component. The sort of fears that everyday users have of something bad happening to them — combined with a sense that even if you’re afraid of it, there’s so much that’s important happening on the Internet that you have to use it — is an issue. And for some people, fear is a reason why they refuse to use it. We have to help people have good experiences and not bad ones.

You wrote about making the internet “a hospitable place.” do you think it’s inhospitable now? My answer really relates to the previous question. On the Internet, it’s really hard to tell if you’ve done the equivalent of ending up in a bad neighborhood. It’s hard to tell if you should be nervous about the experience you’re having. At the superficial level, it’s very welcoming, it’s “Come to my website,” but there’s always a little bit of uncertainty as to what’s happening, and it’s really that that makes me think about

16 CompuTerworld MARCH 26, 2012

it being an inhospitable place. It should be a place where you feel comfortable. For most people, it’s a place they go every day, but I’m not sure how many of them feel comfortable going there.

You wrote about the need for society to address barriers to using the internet. who should lead such efforts? The question is an interesting one, because it implies that we need chosen leadership to accomplish this task. That’s to be studied, not a presumption. If you look at the essence of what makes the Internet what it is today, it’s that nobody’s in charge. I would re-ask this question as: “Do we need leadership in order to accomplish this?” I think nobody needs to be in charge, we just all need to understand these are pressing questions. All that said, this is an issue where the government should pay attention.

You also wrote about people stepping up to design and shape the future of the internet. is it possible to reshape the internet at this point? Let me qualify my answer by being careful about what the Internet means. In the beginning of my [Daedalus] essay, I pointed out that to a technologist, the Internet is a very small part of the experience. It’s that layer of technology that carries one packet from one area to another. When we talk about the user experience and how it’s shaped by the application, the Internet changes very fast. Look at the speed at which Facebook and Twitter and Google+ are emerging. Some of the underlying technology we’ve been trying to change for 10 years, but that doesn’t change the user experience.

who should step up to do this? Let me answer that with a pair of quotes. A famous computer scientist named Alan Kay said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” My variation on that quote is, “The best way to predict the future is to invest in it.” If you look at the early history of the Internet, the investment was made by the government. Today most of the investment comes from the private sector. So what you see today is that most of the incentives to step up and innovate in this space have been motivated by commercial interests, and that’s fine, but who else might have a motive to change the Internet?

how do you ensure that those who step up to shape the future of the internet have beneficial intentions? The question has a presumption of what is beneficial. What’s going on today is just a bunch of experiments. Facebook was an experiment, and it worked. Twitter was an experiment, and it worked. On the Internet, there are issues of fraud and privacy and there will be government interventions, but by and large, I like to say the benefit in most cases is determined by experimentation [and asking]: Did we meet a need?