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Happy 50th birthday to the internet, says the Royal Society, who held a one-day conference in July 2024 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of the TCP/IP protocol standards that form the basis of the internet stack. The conference brought together members of learned societies like the Royal Society, world renown academics, members of civil society groups like the People Centred Internet, professional computing bodies such as the Chartered Institute for IT and the ACM, as well as people from ITU, ICANN, IETF and the public and private sectors.
The UN intends to finalise its Global Digital Compact (GDC) that will ‘outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all’ at the Summit of the Future in September 2024. So the Royal Society event was a good moment for the oldest continuously existing national academy of science, whose Fellows have included Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and today Sir Tim Berners Lee, to explore the opportunities and challenges that the internet may be facing over the next fifty years.
The conference was opened by internet co-creator Dr Vint Cerf, with three panel sessions during the day looking at the Internet as an Infrastructure, the Internet as a Facilitator of Opportunity, and the Internet and Society. If you want to see the entire proceeds online, the Royal Society have promised to shortly put a recording of the day on their website, and they will also soon be publishing a report putting together those discussions.
In his opening presentation Dr Cerf reminded everyone how the internet owes much of its success to its highly decentralised structure, with the only form of any real coordination through DNS and IP addresses. Although now taken for granted, this was a truly revolutionary innovation at the time.
Right from the start, the internet was always intended to lower barriers of access to compute and data exchange to as close to zero as possible. In Dr Cerf’s opinion the internet has been largely responsible for the ubiquity of computers that are now everywhere, and of data that’s now everywhere. All of which has directly stimulated and accelerated the emergence of Data Science as a true academic discipline that in turn has allowed the rise of Machine Learning, Deep Learning and now generative AI.
Dr Cerf was also clear about some of the challenges the internet has created. He pointed out that some people are now using that incredibly low barrier of access to compute and data to do harm. Including through disinformation at scale, widespread sharing of abhorrent child sexual abuse material, and the torrent of malware that is present across far too much of the Web.
In his view some of the architecture behind the internet has inadvertently enabled some of these harms. Data packets don’t know when they cross national boundaries. What he termed the universality of the internet can be at odds with asserting national sovereignty, establishing societal norms online and upholding the rule of law. For Dr Cerf to resolve those kinds of conflicts requires identifiability and accountability to be baked into the very fabric of the internet if it’s going to live up to the aspirations that led to its creation fifty years ago.
A notable topic covered in the ‘Internet as an Infrastructure’ session was the challenge of building out infrastructure in the global south when climate change is now causing extreme weather such as hurricanes/typhoons that easily destroy traditional infrastructure such as wires on poles. As pointed out by Maarteen Botterman, an ICANN Board member, when people talk about the internet, what they mean is internet infrastructure and everything connected to it. Thinking about building out infrastructure means also considering how to improve the development of all the other online services, like generative AI, that people expect to be there. This panel session concluded with a view that further expansion throughout the global south will require advances in reducing the energy consumption of the internet so it can cope with exponential growth. The panel felt that satellite technologies are likely to be widely adopted as a way of leapfrogging past existing technologies that don’t match the available resources of developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
During the ‘Internet as a facilitator of opportunity’ session, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Secretary-General of the ITU, pointed out that today the internet is no longer a luxury but a necessity for modern life. Her aspiration is an internet for the planet. It must become affordable and accessible for everyone everywhere. She believes this can be possible provided there is meaningful multistakeholder engagement to ensure responsible development of the internet. As part of that she is keen to see strong outcomes for the Internet Governance Forum and WSIS as a result of the UN’s GDC.
The final session, ‘Internet and society’, was chaired by Professor Dame Wendy Hall from the University of Southampton. She explained that the internet was never designed to have global governance, which has led to a range of issues now the internet is a cornerstone of daily life. She highlighted that, for example, no one had foreseen the way internet companies would become capable of constantly scraping data from the entire Web in real time, which was a prerequisite for developing generative AI. The panel felt there are genuine concerns about the way public data is being appropriated by special interests to build the next generation of Large Language Models. It was thought there needs to be a rebalance of how we share publicly exposed data through the Web so that it is shared in accordance with the UN Public Data Commons framework.
The panel also believed it’s going to be important that we learn the lessons from failing to build governance into the internet if we want to make sure that as AI evolves and becomes ubiquitous, it can be governed for the benefit of society. A point that came out repeatedly was the need for effective multistakeholder governance that allows governments to responsibly regulate, but that has to be driven through grassroots initiatives for it to genuinely deliver a people-centred internet.
Dr Cerf concluded the day with some final remarks. He was clear companies cannot shirk their responsibility for the way their technologies are used. The different layers of the internet are executed by different parties with their own incentives, which drives their behaviours. To change those incentives needs an understanding of internet layers and the associated liabilities that should go with them. Regulation when used to adjust these liabilities can be a powerful tool to incentivise responsible behaviours, but that will need international collaboration with all the relevant stakeholders.
Well, fingers crossed then for responsible innovation that will ensure the success of the internet over the next 50 years.
The post The Royal Society considers the future of global internet governance appeared first on Nominet.
Continue reading...
The UN intends to finalise its Global Digital Compact (GDC) that will ‘outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all’ at the Summit of the Future in September 2024. So the Royal Society event was a good moment for the oldest continuously existing national academy of science, whose Fellows have included Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and today Sir Tim Berners Lee, to explore the opportunities and challenges that the internet may be facing over the next fifty years.
The conference was opened by internet co-creator Dr Vint Cerf, with three panel sessions during the day looking at the Internet as an Infrastructure, the Internet as a Facilitator of Opportunity, and the Internet and Society. If you want to see the entire proceeds online, the Royal Society have promised to shortly put a recording of the day on their website, and they will also soon be publishing a report putting together those discussions.
In his opening presentation Dr Cerf reminded everyone how the internet owes much of its success to its highly decentralised structure, with the only form of any real coordination through DNS and IP addresses. Although now taken for granted, this was a truly revolutionary innovation at the time.
Right from the start, the internet was always intended to lower barriers of access to compute and data exchange to as close to zero as possible. In Dr Cerf’s opinion the internet has been largely responsible for the ubiquity of computers that are now everywhere, and of data that’s now everywhere. All of which has directly stimulated and accelerated the emergence of Data Science as a true academic discipline that in turn has allowed the rise of Machine Learning, Deep Learning and now generative AI.
Dr Cerf was also clear about some of the challenges the internet has created. He pointed out that some people are now using that incredibly low barrier of access to compute and data to do harm. Including through disinformation at scale, widespread sharing of abhorrent child sexual abuse material, and the torrent of malware that is present across far too much of the Web.
In his view some of the architecture behind the internet has inadvertently enabled some of these harms. Data packets don’t know when they cross national boundaries. What he termed the universality of the internet can be at odds with asserting national sovereignty, establishing societal norms online and upholding the rule of law. For Dr Cerf to resolve those kinds of conflicts requires identifiability and accountability to be baked into the very fabric of the internet if it’s going to live up to the aspirations that led to its creation fifty years ago.
A notable topic covered in the ‘Internet as an Infrastructure’ session was the challenge of building out infrastructure in the global south when climate change is now causing extreme weather such as hurricanes/typhoons that easily destroy traditional infrastructure such as wires on poles. As pointed out by Maarteen Botterman, an ICANN Board member, when people talk about the internet, what they mean is internet infrastructure and everything connected to it. Thinking about building out infrastructure means also considering how to improve the development of all the other online services, like generative AI, that people expect to be there. This panel session concluded with a view that further expansion throughout the global south will require advances in reducing the energy consumption of the internet so it can cope with exponential growth. The panel felt that satellite technologies are likely to be widely adopted as a way of leapfrogging past existing technologies that don’t match the available resources of developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
During the ‘Internet as a facilitator of opportunity’ session, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Secretary-General of the ITU, pointed out that today the internet is no longer a luxury but a necessity for modern life. Her aspiration is an internet for the planet. It must become affordable and accessible for everyone everywhere. She believes this can be possible provided there is meaningful multistakeholder engagement to ensure responsible development of the internet. As part of that she is keen to see strong outcomes for the Internet Governance Forum and WSIS as a result of the UN’s GDC.
The final session, ‘Internet and society’, was chaired by Professor Dame Wendy Hall from the University of Southampton. She explained that the internet was never designed to have global governance, which has led to a range of issues now the internet is a cornerstone of daily life. She highlighted that, for example, no one had foreseen the way internet companies would become capable of constantly scraping data from the entire Web in real time, which was a prerequisite for developing generative AI. The panel felt there are genuine concerns about the way public data is being appropriated by special interests to build the next generation of Large Language Models. It was thought there needs to be a rebalance of how we share publicly exposed data through the Web so that it is shared in accordance with the UN Public Data Commons framework.
The panel also believed it’s going to be important that we learn the lessons from failing to build governance into the internet if we want to make sure that as AI evolves and becomes ubiquitous, it can be governed for the benefit of society. A point that came out repeatedly was the need for effective multistakeholder governance that allows governments to responsibly regulate, but that has to be driven through grassroots initiatives for it to genuinely deliver a people-centred internet.
Dr Cerf concluded the day with some final remarks. He was clear companies cannot shirk their responsibility for the way their technologies are used. The different layers of the internet are executed by different parties with their own incentives, which drives their behaviours. To change those incentives needs an understanding of internet layers and the associated liabilities that should go with them. Regulation when used to adjust these liabilities can be a powerful tool to incentivise responsible behaviours, but that will need international collaboration with all the relevant stakeholders.
Well, fingers crossed then for responsible innovation that will ensure the success of the internet over the next 50 years.
The post The Royal Society considers the future of global internet governance appeared first on Nominet.
Continue reading...
