Ok, so, it's time for the keynotes and we are very honoured to have
Eben Moglen here as first keynote speaker
He is a professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University.
He is probably most known for his involvement in the FSF
and for creating the Software Freedom Law Centre.
He was also heavily involved in the creation of the GPL version 3
and many other things of course and so he will give a talk here today about
Why political liberty depends on software freedom more than ever.
Eben Moglen, thank you.
Thank you, good morning it's a great pleasure to be here.
I wanna thank the organisers for the miracle that FOSDEM is
You all know that only chaos
could create an organisation of this quality and power
and it's an honour for me to play a little bit of a role in it.
I know how eager you are to deal with technical matters
and I'm sorry to start with politics first thing in the morning, but it's urgent.
You've been watching it all around the world the past several weeks haven't you?
It's about how politics actually works now
for people actually seeking freedom now
for people trying to make change in their world now.
Software is what the 21st century is made of.
What steel was to the economy of the 20th century
what steel was to the power of the 20th century
what steel was to the politics of the 20th century, software is now.
It's the crucial building block, the component out of which everything else is made.
And when I speak of everything else I mean, of course, freedom.
As well as tyranny, as well as business as usual
as well as spying on everybody for free all the time.
In other words, the very composition of social life
the way it works or doesn't work for us
the way it works or doesn't work for those who own
the way it works or doesn't work for those who oppress
all now depends on software.
At the other end of this hastening process
when we started our little conspiracy you and me and everybody else
you remember how it works, right?
I mean it's a simple idea.
Make freedom, put freedom in everything, turn freedom on, right?
That was how the conspiracy was designed that's how the thing is supposed to work
We did pretty well with it and about halfway through stage 1
my dear friend Larry Lessig figured out what was going on for us
and he wrote his first quite astonishing book "Code"
in which he said that code was going to do the work of law in the 21st century.
That was a crucial idea out of which much else got born
including creative commons and a bunch of other useful things.
The really important point now is that code does the work of law
and the work of the state and code does the work of revolution against the state.
And code does all the work that the state does
trying to retain its power in revolutionary situations.
But code also organises the people in the street.
We're having enormous demonstration around the world right now
of the power of code in both directions.
The newspapers in the United States this past month have been full of the buzz
around the book called "The Net Delusion" by Evgeny Morozov
A very interesting book taking a more pessimistic view of the political nature of the changes in the net
Mr. Morozov who comes from Belarus
and therefore has a clear understanding of the mechanism of 21st century despotism
sees the ways in which the institutions of the net
are increasingly being co-opted by the state in an effort to limit control or eliminate freedom.
And his summary of half decade of policy papers on that subject in his book
is a warning to the technological optimists, at least he says it is
about the nature of the net delusion that the net brings freedom.
I am, I guess, one of the technological optimists because I do think the net brings freedom.
I don't think Mr. Morozov is wrong, however.
The wrong net brings tyranny and the right net brings freedom.
This is a version of the reason why I still have the buttons for distribution
that says "Stallman was right".
The right net brings freedom and the wrong net brings tyranny
because it all depends on how the code works.
All right, so we all know that.
We've spent a lot of time making free software.
We've spent a lot of time putting free software in everything
and we have tried to turn freedom on.
We have also joined forces with other elements
of the free culture world that we helped to bring into existence.
I've known Jimmy Wales a long time and Julian Assange, and that changes the world.
Wikipedia and Wikileaks are two sides of the same coin.
They are the two sides of the same coin the third side of which is FOSDEM.
It is the power of ordinary people to organise, to change the world
without having to create hierarchy
and without having to recapitulate the structures of power
that are being challenged by the desire to make freedom.
Wikileaks was being treated everywhere around the world
in a semi-criminal fashion at Christmas time
and then events in Tunisia made it a little more complicated.
As it became clear that what was being reported on around the world
as though it was primarily a conspiracy to injure the dignity of the US State Department
or to embarrass the United States military
was actually, really, an attempt to allow people to learn about their world.
To learn about how power really operates and therefore to do something about it.
And what happened in Tunisia was, I thought, an eloquent rebuttal
to the idea that the Wikileaks and free culture and free software
was primarily engaged in destruction, nihilism or I shrink from even employing
the word in this context, terrorism.
It was instead freedom which is messy, complicated,
potentially damaging in the short term but salvational in the long term.
The medicine for the human soul.
It's hard, I know, because most of the time when we're coding
it doesn't feel like we're doing anything
that the human soul is directly very much involved in
to take with full seriousness
the political and spiritual meaning of free software at the present hour.
But there are a lot of Egyptians whose freedom now depends
upon their ability to communicate with one another
through a database owned for-profit by a guy in California
who obeys orders from governments, who send orders to disclose to Facebook.
We are watching in real time the evolution of the kinds of politics
of liberation and freedom in the 21st century that code can make
and we are watching in real time the discovery of the vulnerabilities
that arise from the bad engineering of the current system.
Social networking, that is the ability to use free-form methods of communication
from many to many, now, in an instantaneous fashion
changes the balance of power in society.
Away from highly organised vehicles of state control
towards people in their own lives.
What has happened in Iran, in Egypt, in Tunisia
and what will happen in other societies over the next few years
demonstrates the enormous political and social importance of social networking.
But everything we know about technology tells us
that the current forms of social network communication
despite their enormous current value for politics are also intensely dangerous to use.
They are too centralised
They are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.
And the design of their technology
like the design of almost all unfree software technology
is motivated more by business interests seeking profit
than by technological interests seeking freedom.
As a result of which, we are watching
political movements of enormous value
capable of transforming the lives of hundreds of millions of people
resting on a fragile basis like for example the courage of Mr. Zuckerberg
or the willingness of Google to resist the state
where the state is a powerful business partner
and a party Google cannot afford to insult.
We are living in a world in which real-time information
crucial to people in the street seeking to build their freedom
depends on a commercial micro-blogging service in northern California
which must turn a profit in order to justify its existence
to the people who design its technology
and which we know is capable of deciding overnight all by itself
to donate the entire history of everything, everybody said through it
to the library of Congress.
Which means, I suppose, that in some other place
they could make a different style of donation.
We need to fix this. We need to fix it quickly.
We are now behind the curve of the movements for freedom that depend on code.
And every day that we don't fix the problems created by the use of insecure, over-centralised
overcapitalised social network media to do the politics of freedom
the real politics of freedom in the street, where the tanks are.
The more we don't fix this, the more we are becoming part of the system
which will bring about a tragedy soon.
What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring.
But the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the net
and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been.
It is not hard when everybody's just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg
to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse.
We need to think deeply and rapidly and to good technological effect
about the consequences of what we have built and what we haven't built yet.
I pointed a couple of times already to the reason why
centralised social networking and data distribution services
should be replaced by federated services.
I was talking about that intensively last year
before this recent round of demonstrations in the street
of the importance of the whole thing began.
And I want to come back to the projects I have been advocating.
But let me just say here, again, from this other perspective
that the overcentralisation of network services is a crucial political vulnerability.
Friends of ours, people seeking freedom
are going to get arrested, beaten, tortured and eventually killed somewhere on earth.
Because they're depending for their political survival in their movements for freedom
on technology we know, is built to sell them out.
If we care about freedom as much as we do
and if we are as bright with technology as we are
we have to address that problem. We are actually running out of time.
Because people whose movements we care deeply about
are already out there in harm's way using stuff that can hurt them.
I don't want anybody taking life or death risks to make freedom somewhere carrying an iPhone.
Because I know what that iPhone can be doing to him
without our having any way to control it, stop it, help it or even know what's going on.
We need to think infrastructurally about what we mean to freedom now.
And we need to learn the lessons of what we see happening around us in real time.
One thing that the Egyptian situation showed us
as we probably knew after the Iranian situation
when we watched the forces of the Iranian state buy the telecommunications carriers
as we learnt when the Egyptians begin to lean on Vodafone last week.
We learn again why closed networks are so harmful to us.
Why the ability to build a kill switch on the infrastructure
by pressuring the for-profit communications carriers
who must have a way of life with government in order to survive
can harm our people seeking freedom using technology we understand well.
Now, what can we do to help freedom under circumstances where the state
has decided to try to clamp the network infrastructure?
Well, we can go back to mesh networking.
We've got to go back to mesh networking.
We've got to understand how we can provide people
using the ordinary devices already available to them or cheaply available to them
to build networking that resists centralised control.
Mesh networking in densely populated urban environments
is capable of sustaining the kind of social action
we saw in Cairo and in Alexandria this week.
Even without the centralised network services providers
if people have wireless routers that mesh up in their apartments, in their work places
in the places of public resort around them they can continue to communicate
despite attempts in central terms to shut them down.
We need to go back to ensuring people
secure end-to-end communications over those local meshes.
We need to provide survivable conditions
for the kinds of communications that people now depend upon
outside the context of centralised networking environments
that can be used to surveil, control, arrest or shut them down.
Can we do this? Sure. Are we gonna do this?
If we don't, the great social promise of the free software movement
that free software can lead to free society will begin to be broken.
Force will intervene somewhere soon and a demonstration will be offered to humanity
that even with all that networking technology
and all those young people seeking to build new lives for themselves
the state still wins.
This must not happen.
If you look at that map of the globe at night the one where all the lights on
and imagine next time you look at it that you're looking instead at a network graph
instead of an electrical infrastructure graph
you'll feel like a kind of pulsing coming out of the North American continent
where all the world's data mining is being done.
Think of it that way, right?
North America is becoming the heart of the global data mining industry
Its job is becoming knowing everything about everybody, everywhere.
When Dwight Eisenhower was leaving the presidency in 1960
he made a famous farewell speech to the American people
in which he warned them against the power of the military industrial complex
a phrase that became so common place in discussion
that people stopped thinking seriously about what it meant.
The general who had run the largest military activity of the 20th century
the invasion of Europe.
The general who had become the president of America at the height of the cold war
was warning Americans about the permanent changes to their society
that would result from the interaction
of industrial capitalism with American military might.
And since the time of that speech, as you all know,
the United States has spent on defence more than the rest of the world combined.
Now, in the 21st century, which we can define as after the latter part of September 2001
the United States began to build a new thing.
A surveillance industrial military complex.
The Washington Post produced the most important piece of public journalism in the United States last year
a series available to you online called 'Top Secret America'
in which the Washington Post not only wrote eight very useful, lengthy, analytic stories
about the classified sector of American industrial life
built around surveillance and data processing.
The Post produced an enormous database which is publicly available to everyone
through the newspaper of all the classified contractors
available to them in public record
what they do for the government, what they're paid
and what can be known about them.
A database which can be used to create all sorts of journalism
beyond what the Post published itself.
I would encourage everybody to take a look at 'Top Secret America'.
What it will show you is how many goggles there are
under the direct control of the United States government
as well as how many goggles there are under the control of Google.
In other words the vast outspreading web
which joins the traditional post second world war US listening
to everything everywhere on earth outside the United States
to the newly available listening to things inside the United States
that used to be against the law in my country as I knew its law
to all the data now available in all the commercial collection systems
which includes everything you type into search boxes about
what you believe, wish, hope, fear or doubt as well as every travel reservation you make
and every piece of tracking data coming off your friendly smartphone.
When governments talk about the future of the net these days
I have on decent authority from government officials in several countries.
When governments talk about the future of the net these days
they talk almost entirely in terms of cyberwar.
A field in which I've never had much interest and which has a jargon all its own
but some current lessons from inter-governmental discussions
about cyberwar are probably valuable to us here.
The three most powerful collections of states on earth
the United States of America, the European Union and the People's Republic of China
discuss cyberwar at a fairly high inter-governmental level fairly regularly.
Some of the people around that table have disagreements of policy
but there is a broad area of consensus.
In the world of cyberwar they talk about exfiltration.
We would call that spying, they mean exfiltrating our data off our networks into their pockets.
Exfiltration, I am told by government officials here and there and everywhere
exfiltration is broadly considered by all the governments to be a free fire zone.
Everybody may listen to everything everywhere all the time
we don't believe in any governmental limits
and the reason is every government wants to listen
and no government believes listening can be prevented.
On that latter point, I think they're too pessimistic
but let's grant them that they've spent a lot of money trying
and they think they know.
Where the disagreements currently exist
I am told by the government officials I talked to
concerns not exfiltration, but what they call network disruption.
By which they mean destroying freedom.
The basic attitude here is of a two parties in balanced speech.
One side in that conversation says what we want is clear rules.
We want to know what we are allowed to attack,
what we have to defend and what we do with the things that are neither friendly nor enemy.
The other side in that conversation says we recognise no distinctions.
Anywhere on the net where there is a threat
to our national security or our national interests,
we claim the right to disrupt or destroy that threat
regardless of its geographical location.
I need not to characterise for you which among the governments
the United States of America, the European Union
or the People's Republic of China take those different positions.
And I should say that my guess is that within all those governments
there are differences of opinion on those points
dominant factions and less dominant factions
but all parties are increasingly aware
that in North America is where the data mining is.
And that's either a benefit, a dubiousness or a problem
depending upon which state or collection of states you represent.
European data protection law has done this much.
It has put your personal data almost exclusively in North America where it is uncontrolled.
To that extent, European legislation succeded.
The data mining industries are concentrated outside the European Union
largely for reasons of legal policy.
They operate as any enterprise tends to operate in the part of the world
where there is least control over their behaviour.
There is no prospect that the North American governments
particularly the government of the United States
whose national security policy now depends on listening and data mining everything
are going to change that for you.
No possibility. No time soon.
When he was a candidate for president, at the beginning
in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama was in favour
of not immunising American telecommunications giants
for participation in spying domestically inside the United States
without direct public legal authorisation.
By the time he was a candidate in the general election
he was no longer in favour of preventing immunisation
Indeed he, as a Senator from Illinois
did not fillibuster the legislation immunising the telecomms giants and it went through.
As you are aware the Obama administration's policies
with respect to data mining, surveillance and domestic security in the net
are hardly different from the predecessor administrations'
except where they are more aggressive about government control.
We can't depend upon the pro-freedom bias
in the listening to everybody, everywhere about everything now going on.
Profit motive will not produce privacy
let alone will it produce robust defence for freedom in the street.
If we are going to build systems of communication for future politics
we're going to have to build them under the assumption
that the network is not only untrusted, but untrustworthy.
And we're going to have to build under the assumption that centralised services can kill you.
We can't fool around about this.
We can't let Facebook dance up and down about their privacy policy. That's ludicrous.
We have to replace the things that create vulnerability
and lure our colleagues around the world into using them
to make freedom only to discover
that the promise is easily broken by a kill switch.
Fortunately we actually do know how to engineer ourselves out of this situation.
Cheap, small, low power plug servers are the form factor we need.
And they exist everywhere now
and they will get very cheap very quick very soon.
A small device the size of a cell phone charger
running a low power chip with a wireless NIC or two
and some other available ports
and some very sweet free software of our own
is a practical device for creating significant personal privacy
and freedom based communications.
Think what it needs to have in it.
Mesh networking, we are not quite there, but we should be.
OpenBTS, asterisk, yeah, we could make telephone systems
that are self-constructing out of parts that cost next to nothing.
Federated, rather than centralised, micro-blogging
social networking, photo exchange,
anonymous publication platforms based around cloudy web servers.
We can do all of that.
Your data at home in your house where they have to come and get it
facing whatever the legal restrictions are,
if any, in your society about
what goes on inside the precincts of the home.
Encrypted email, just all the time
perimeter defence for all those wonky Windows computers
and other bad devices that roll over any time they're pushed at by a twelve year old
Proxy services for climbing over national firewalls.
Smart tunnelling to get around anti-neutrality activity
by upstream ISPs and other network providers.
All of that can be easily done on top of stuff we already make and use all the time.
We have general purpose distributions of stacks more than robust enough for all of this
and a little bit of application layer work to do on the top.
Yesterday in the United States we formed the Freedom Box Foundation
which I plan to use as the temporary or long term as the case may be
organisational headquarters for work making free software
to run on small format server boxes
free hardware wherever possible unfree hardware where we must
in order to make available around the world at low prices
appliances human beings will like interacting with
that produce privacy and help to secure robust freedom.
We can make such objects cheaper than the chargers for smart phones.
We can give people something that they can buy at very low cost
that will go in their houses that will run free software
to provide them services that make life better on the ordinary days
and really come into their own on those not so ordinary days
when we are out in the street making freedom thank you for calling.
A Belarussian theatre troupe that got arrested and heavily beaten on
after the so called elections in Minsk this winter
exfiltrated itself to New York city in January
did some performances of Tom Stoppard and gave some interviews
I'm sorry of Harold Pinter and gave some interviews
One of the Belarussian actors who was part of that troupe
said in an interview to New York Times
the Belarussian KGB is the most honest organisation on earth.
After the Soviet Union fell apart they saw no need to change anything they did
so they saw no need to change their name either.
And I thought that was a really quite useful comment.
We need to keep in mind that they are exactly the same people they always were
whether they're in Cairo or Moscow or Belarus or Los Angeles or Jakarta
or anywhere else on earth.
They're exactly the same people they always were.
So are we exactly the same people we always were too.
We set out a generation ago to make freedom and we're still doing it.
But we have to pick up the pace now.
We have to get more urgent now.
We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now.
Because we have friends in the street trying to create human freedom.
And if we don't help them they'll get hurt.
We rise to challenges, this is one. We've got to do it. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much and I think there is enough time for a few questions
so please raise your hand if you want to
The question was what does complete decentralisation mean for identity
because the state, you may believe who you are but the state gives you a passport
or some other legal document that allows you to identify yourself.
So in complete decentralisation how do you identify yourself on that network?
I doubt that complete decentralisation is the outcome of anything
but let me tell you a story which may help to explain how I feel about this.
We need to go back now by 16 years to a time when there was a program called PGP
and there was a government in the United States that was trying to eradicate it.
I know this will seem like ancient history to many people, but it's my life so it doesn't to me.
We were having a debate at Harvard Law School in January of 1995
two on two about PGP and the criminal investigation and the future of secrecy.
The debators on my side were me and Danny Whitesner
then at the Electronic Privacy Information Center
later at the W3C and now in the United States Department of Commerce.
And on the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States
and a former General Counsel of the National Security Agency.
We debated PGP and then encryption and the clipper chip and various other,
now long dead, subjects for a couple of hours
and then we were all on an offered little dinner at the Harvard faculty club.
On the way across the Harvard campus
the Deputy Attorney General of the United States said to me
Eben, on the basis of your public statements this afternoon
I have enough to order the interception of your telephone conversations.
She thought that was a joke.
And back in 1995 you could sort of get away with thinking it was a joke
as the Deputy Attorney General of the United States because it was so clearly against the law.
So I smiled and we went off, we had our dinner
and after the plates were cleared and the walnuts and the port had been strewn about
this former General Counsel to the National Security Agency
I'm concealing names to protect the not so innocent here
this former NSA lawyer, he looked around the table calmly
and with that sort of plummy through the port kind of look
and he said ok we'll let our head down we agree we're not gonna prosecute your client
PGP will happen. We've fought a long delaying action
against public key encryption but it's coming to an end now.
And then he looked around the table and he said but nobody here cares about anonymity, do they?
And a cold chill went up my spine
because I knew what the next 15 years were gonna be about.
So I would like to turn around the thing you said to say
what we're really talking about is whether there's gonna be any preservation of anonymity at all.
Where power on the other side made its peace in the mid 1990s
was with the idea that there would be strong encryption
and e-commerce but there would be no anomymity.
And in the course of the last decade they picked up a strong alliance
with the global entertainment industries
the things that now call themselves content companies
which are also adverse to anonymity, right?
cause they wanna know what you read and listen to and watch every single time
so that you can increase their shareholders' wealth for them.
The real problem of identity isn't the problem of
are we gonna be decentralised past the point when we have identity
we are not going to do that. We are not going to be able to do that.
The real problem of identity is are we gonna have any of our own?
or are we gonna be the data cloud that everybody else is keeping about us
which contains where we are, what we do, what we think what we read, what we eat and everything else too
as long as you send a subpoena
to Mr. Zuckerberg who has the one big database in which you live your entire life.
I understand the idea that we might be thought of or satirically
or even pointedly claim to be
trying too radically decentralise to the point in which identity gets lost.
But if you find yourself in an argument where people telling you
you are trying to anarchise so far that there won't be any name in the passport anymore
you can reassure them that meat-space will stay pretty much the way it is right now.
We just want fewer people ripping fingernails off in meat-space.
Which is why we are busy building Freedom Boxes and helping people use them.
Thank you very much, the passport will remain pretty much the way it is right now
with the RFID chip in it and the fingerprints and the retinal scan and everything.
I'm not worried that we are going to go too far friends.
It's the other folks who went way too far and our job's to get back home.
Hello Eben, I'm here.
Jérémie from La Quadrature du Net
First of all I want to thank you and I will never thank you enough
for how inspiring you are for everyone of us
By thanking you for inspiring us under an engineering perspective
as I am both an engineering geek and a political activist by what I do.
I wanted to stress that the ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
that deeply concern strengthening of DRMs and the legal protection
and also turns every internet service provider
every internet intermediate into private copyright police
with deep consequence on our freedom of speech, our privacy, on right to a fair trial and so on.
The ACTA will be coming to the European Parliament around next summer
maybe before maybe after and it will be our ultimate chance to defeat the thing.
We won in the European Parliament before.
This is a battle we can win and everybody here can participate into it
and I wanted to ask you Eben
Are those legislative fights worth fighting? Do we still have a chance?
and especially on the front of the net neutrality,
What are your insights? What do you think? Can we still win today?
No European citizen should need any introduction to Jérémie Zimmermann, right?
That's the future of the European Union speaking to you.
Your question: Should we bother fighting in legislature
seems to me fair, oh yeah we should. It's unpleasant work.
I worry about you. I don't want your heart to burst.
I don't want people killing themselves over the strain of it.
It's ugly, boring, tedious work
and the other side pays people to sit you out to wait until you go home, to decide you give up.
Think of Egypt as a place where that was done for thirty years along with torture.
Everything stops moving.
If you read Claude Manceron on the French revolution
or the coming of the French revolution
as he moves his thousands of men and women of freedom
towards the climactic events of the late 1780s
you see how deeply the feeling in France at the end of the Ancien Régime
was of status beginning to break up into movement.
The work you're talking about is work that is largely defensive
to prevent harm from being done.
And as you say you are lucky when you win after an enormous effort that nothing happens.
But the good news is in legislative politics that there is a thousand ways to stop a thing
and only one way for it to get done.
And therefore the side that wants to stop things has an inherent advantage.
Most of the time that's deeply funded capital but sometimes it's us.
About ACTA, I think there is no question. It's a fight worth fighting everywhere all the time.
Because as you say it's really the concordat, the treaty between the state and private power
for the control of the net under 21st century conditions
in the mingled interests of the listeners and the owners.
If we do beat it, water it down, force withdrawal of particularly offensive premises
or significantly expose it to disinfecting daylight
we will help ourselves.
We are not going to achieve everything by any means.
We need to turn the international trade conversation in the direction of direct support for freedom.
My line with the trade negotiators around the world has become:
Governments have a right to share
the sharing economy has as much right to support in the international trade system as the owning economy.
My colleague Mishi Choudhary who directs SFLC India
was in Beijing making a speech on that point earlier this year.
We will be re-iterating that point in various places around the world
where strong states with which we have other difficulties
meet with us in recognising that the world trade system
is now overwhelmingly tilted in favour of ownership based production
which is only one part of the world's economic production.
We need to press hard against ACTA and other pro-ownership trade law
but we also need to begin to roll out an affirmative strategy of our own
demanding protection for sharing based economic activities in the global trade system.
That effort will take 20 years to begin to show fruit
but we need to begin that too now.
On network neutrality I will say this
We are going to have to establish counterforce to the various oligopolists of telecommunications.
The regulators believe a lot of things they have been told by industry.
I was at ARCEP myself in September to discuss wireless network neutrality in Paris
with regulators who are well educated, shrewd, thoughtful and capable
but who believe something which isn't true.
Namely that it costs enormous monetary investments to build wireless networks.
And I said to the ARCEP regulators Do you know about OpenBTS?
Do you know that I can take a coat hanger and a laptop
and make a GSM cell phone base station out of it using some free software?
Do you know about Asterisk?
I suggested that maybe they would like to give us a small French city, say, Grenoble.
where using the extraodinary high quality wired harness
that they built around the hexagon that is France
we will create cell phone companies out of nowhere
using cheap commodity hardware and existing handsets and provide service to everybody.
And then I say it will be possible to have a realistic fact-based discussion
about whether the enormous investment necessities of wireless network build out
require non-neutrality in network routing practices.
Well, the regulator of course nods and smiles and thanks me very much for all that information
and forgets it the minute I leave.
Because he still believes what Orange, that used to be France Télécom, tells him
about how you can't make wireless networks without immense monetary investments.
We will begin to gain on network neutrality
when we have a box in everybody's apartment that can offer free telephone service over tunnelling
around non-neutrality and talk to GSM handsets. Oh, that would be the Freedom Box.
See, that's what I wanna do. I wanna build a ring of engineering
around the idea of non-neutral network management.
I wanna have a box in your house that senses the upstream and says
oh my God he's stopping port 655
I think I'll route that from my friend's apartment.
Then I think we will get some interesting network neutrality conversation going.
When you call for decentralisation
aren't you really going against the trend of history as we've seen it?
For example we used to have Usenet which was decentralised
that's moved much more to web based forums.
Or likewise we in geekdom may love IRC. We may go to Freenode
but the general public all know about Twitter which is moving into that space.
And I think there are many reasons why this could be happening
but I think the primary reason is perhaps mindshare. The journalists who report this to the general public
outside geekdom know about websites, they know about Twitter.
They never knew about Usenet so only geeks know about that
If we take this point perhaps the mindshare you need to be going for is the journalists
who report on the net, get them to report on decentralised networks
and get the public to start using them.
Yes, it's a crucial part of the activity, that's right.
We're going to talk to people.
Some of those people are gonna be journalists and some of them are gonna be our friends
and some of them are gonna be other engineers and some of them are gonna be people who
when their wireless router breaks they can go out buying a Freedom Box
cause it's cheaper and neater and cooler and does more good stuff.
And some of them are gonna be people who buy because they need it.
We just have to make the software.
The hardware guys will make the hardware and everything will happen.
I don't know how long. I don't know with what degree of certainty.
But I don't know if it's about going against the flow of history.
I think it's about pushing the pendulum back.
The general public have to know that this option exists and will serve their needs.
Yes, Apple will always advertise more than we will.
But the general public knows about Firefox so they can know about the Freedom Box too.
I think we have to stop in order to allow the conference to go on.
Thank you very much for your time.