Part 1
History of the internet
– ARPAnet
– The Turing Test
– Sir Tim Berners-Lee
– W3C
– Welcome to Solid!
Part 2
Free and Open Source Software
– Extra Extra
– The Wayback Machine: The Internet Archive
– The Electronic Frontier Foundation
Part 3
From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg
– A Global Game-changer: From Gutenberg to Assange
Part 4
The Future of the Internet
– The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998)
– The FCC, Net Neutrality & Future Enrons of the Internet
– BlackHat (2015): The End of the Internet Dream
– The Lifecycle of a Revolution
– Monopolisation of the Internet Commons:
"I'm dreaming of a future when 'good governance' will provide access to digital 'domains' as part of public services and infrastructure. Imagine the benefits of earnings going into 'consolidated revenues' instead of private hands." – Maireid Sullivan, Why I joined Facebook, 2013
What is Netiquette?
"..a social code that is used in all places where one can interact with other human beings via the Internet, including text messaging, email, online games, Internet forums, chat rooms, and many more." Wikipedia
In Defence of Net Neutrality
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
June 28, 2017 "As the battle around net neutrality rages again, we need to take stock, and ask ourselves: What is the debate really about, and why should business leaders and entrepreneurs care? …"
Excerpt: Perhaps the most serious rebuttal on the theory of Pentagon origins (otherwise known as the big bang theory of Internet origins) came from the person who was in charge of the Pentagon Arpanet project at the time when the Internet supposedly began – Bob Taylor. Writing in reference to a mailing list invitation to attend the 35th anniversary event, Bob Taylor explained: "In February of 1966 I initiated the ARPAnet project.I was Director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from late '65 to late '69. There were only two people involved in the decision to launch the ARPAnet: my boss, the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld, and me. Numerous untruths have been disseminated about events surrounding the origins of the ARPAnet. Here are some facts: The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by considerations of war. The ARPAnet was not an internet. An internet is a connection between two or more computer networks." >>> more
"the fathers of the Internet"
During 1973-81, Vint Cerf and Robert E. Kahn co-designed Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), the two original protocols of the Internet protocol suite: “Cerf began his work at the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) playing a key role in leading the development of Internet and Internet-related data packet and security technologies. … Cerf also served from 2000-2007 as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an organization he helped form.”
Since 2005, Cerf has served as vice president of Google. See the Internet Hall of Fame listings HERE
Excerpt:
In 1944, at the invasion of Normandy that Allied control of the Atlantic allowed, Alan Turing was almost uniquely in possession of three key ideas:
– his own 1936 concept of the universal machine
– the potential speed and reliability of electronic technology
– the inefficiency in designing different machines for different logical processes.
“CREN provided a range of membership services to more than 220 universities and colleges around the United States, many of which focused on networking and network security issues. CREN was well known for its "TechTalk" series of regular webcasts featuring expert speakers on a wide range of technology subjects. ... At its peak in 1991-2, this network connected organizations in 49 countries, for the electronic non-commercial exchange of information in support of research and education, and CREN's membership rose to over 1400 institutions including many overseas. BITNET was for several years the largest academic network in the world for computer-based communications. It also developed the concept of the email list service (and tools such as LISTSERV and LISTPROC), by which a person could conveniently send email to a broad group. "These days we take all our one-to-many and many-to-many communications tools for granted. Long before there were web-based chat-rooms and instant messaging tools, CREN created the first messaging tool beyond one-to-one e-mail," said Ken King, Board Member Emeritus. CREN was formed in 1989, as the result of a merger of BITNET Inc. and CSNET.- >>>more
"The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet.
The future is still so much bigger than the past." - Sir Tim Berners-Lee
What do we want? Raw data!
Watch Sir Tim Berners-Lee's TED.com lectures here Delivering Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a web of shared benefit, for everyone.
When Oxford University graduate Tim Berners-Lee developed the technology that launched 'the Web' we know today, he made it freely accessible to the public domain - in other words, the web belongs to all of us.
"I wanted to see the Web proliferate, not sink my life’s hours into worrying over a product release."
– Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Tim Berners-Lee's first hypertext database system was launched in 1980, while he was working at CERN, Geneva, and by 1989, he had invented the World Wide Web for global information sharing. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990.
"I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web... Creating the web was really an act of desperation . . . Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. . ."
– Tim Berners-Lee, 1990
Tim Berners-Lee's specifications of URLs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread. He is a Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which continues to promote open government data globally and is a member of the UK's Public Sector Transparency Board.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee was dubbed a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II during an Investiture in London on Friday, 16 July 2004. >>> more
TheWorld Wide Web Foundation (W3C) was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts furthering the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
See talks by W3C speakers here.
LCS became one of the largest research labs at MIT with 400 faculty members, graduate students, and research staff. LCS dedicated itself to the invention, development and understanding of information technologies, always within the context of their human utility.
"The first three socioeconomic revolutions were all based on things—the plow for the agrarian revolution, the motor for the industrial revolution and the computer for the information revolution. Perhaps the time has come for the world to consider a fourth revolution, aimed no longer at objects but at understanding the most precious resource on earth—ourselves."
- Michael Dertouzos, The Future of Computing (circa 1999), Scientific American, August 1999
"We made a big mistake 300 years ago when we separated technology and humanism," Dertouzos said in an interview in Scientific American. "It's time to put the two back together."
– Michael Dertouzos (Athens, Greece, 1936 – Massachusetts, USA, 2001: Obituary)
“… Virtual meetings could never be the same as physical meetings, he [Professor Dertouzos] used to say, because of the effect of the cave, that when you are in a small space with someone, you know subconsciously they could hurt you, which changed the dynamic completely…”
– Tim Berners-Lee, Oct. 2011
Excerpt:
A few months into the coronavirus pandemic, the web is more central to humanity’s functioning than I could have imagined 30 years ago. It’s now a lifeline for billions of people and businesses worldwide. But I’m more frustrated now with the current state of the web than ever before. We could be doing so much better. >>>more
Excerpt: I’ve always believed the web is for everyone. That’s why I and others fight fiercely to protect it. The changes we’ve managed to bring have created a better and more connected world. But for all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas.
Today, I believe we’ve reached a critical tipping point, and that powerful change for the better is possible — and necessary.
This is why I have, over recent years, been working with a few people at MIT and elsewhere to develop Solid, an open-source project to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web.
Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we’ve all discovered, this hasn’t been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance — by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way. . . . >>> more
"Mozilla is on a mission to keep the Internet growing and healthy.
... to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all.
An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent." Read the Mozilla Manifesto
The Wayback Machine aka the InternetArchive.org is a San Francisco–based nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". What does it do? It captures data: More than 500 billion web pages saved over time.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. We work to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 50,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public. >>> more
Mass communication emerged across Europe in 1439,
when Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468) developed the printing press which inspired the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment, leading to the scientific revolution that brought learning to the masses.
From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg Conference: Media, Power, Revolution - Making the 21st Century
2,3,4, April 2012, University of London
Interview with Irish academic and Cambridge Professor John Naughton, author From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg(2011), following discussion with University of New South Wales' Australian Defense Force Academy Professor of Engineering Evgeny Morozov at the 2012 Media, Power, Revolution conference: Professor Naughton expressed concern over hasty regulations of the internet that could compromise its "disruptive and creative" aspects.
Partial transcript:
(00:30) I agree with him, that what he sees as the two besetting signals of public discourse about the internet, at least in terms of policy. That is to say, on the one hand, cyber utopianism - the belief that the internet is a truly, truly, truly revolutionary thing which will change everything. And, what he calls “internet centrism” which is about thinking that [almost?] every public policy can be somehow addressed using the internet - and that’s it. I agree with him that both of those positions are superficial and not helpful. And, I agree with him, that they dominate public discourse at the moment. but that’s as far as I go with him.
(1:10)
My main point of difference is that he thinks that what we should be focusing on mainly are applications of the internet which trouble us in various ways. Either because they undermine the business models of powerful industries or because they threaten governments with - by giving voice to uncomfortable political movements - or whatever. He thinks that’s what we should focus on and we should stop worrying about the INTERNET - in capital letters.
(1:50)
My problem is that if you get clueless legislation then you may, either accidentally or deliberately, undermine some of the things that are really important about the internet. And the most important thing about the internet, from my point of view, is that its a global machine for springing surprises. And the thing that’s critical about that is that it has lowered the barriers to innovation dramatically. So, for example, the five - I think five of the largest companies on the internet were all founded with almost no money and what funding they had at the beginning was comprised mainly of the savings of the people who set them up, and that’s true for Amazon. It’s true for eBay. It’s true for Facebook. So you have these amazing innovative -huge companies which have grown from the kind of innovation that would not, once, have been possible.
(2:50)
I mean, Facebook has 850 million users, half of whom check in every day. If it was a country, it would be the third biggest country in the world. It would have a seat in the United Nations. And it’s the product of a single lad sitting in a Harvard dormitory. And all he needed to do is borrow a thousand bucks from his friend, Edwardo, in order to get it on the net. The same thing is true for the Web. The Web comes from a single individual - namely Tim Berner-Lee. He has an idea that can be realised using software. He gets permission from his boss to spend six months working on it and then he does so and then he releases it onto the internet and, bingo, we have the web. Now that kind of stuff never happened before. That’s why it’s important.
(3:28)
I want to respond to President Trump's tweet this morning claiming Facebook has always been against him.
Every day I work to bring people together and build a community for everyone. We hope to give all people a voice and create a platform for all ideas.
Trump says Facebook is against him. Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like. That's what running a platform for all ideas looks like.
The facts suggest the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was different from what most are saying:
- More people had a voice in this election than ever before. There were billions of interactions discussing the issues that may have never happened offline. Every topic was discussed, not just what the media covered.
- This was the first US election where the internet was a primary way candidates communicated. Every candidate had a Facebook page to communicate directly with tens of millions of followers every day.
- Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That's 1000x more than any problematic ads we've found.
- We ran "get out the vote" efforts that helped as many as 2 million people register to vote. To put that in perspective, that's bigger than the get out the vote efforts of the Trump and Clinton campaigns put together. That's a big deal.
After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election.
We will continue to work to build a community for all people. We will do our part to defend against nation states attempting to spread misinformation and subvert elections. We'll keep working to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world, and to ensure our community is a platform for all ideas and force for good in democracy.
From Gutenberg to Assange Media dead silent as Wikileaks insider explodes the myths around Julian Assange by Greg Bean
Aug 16, 2019, Michael West Media On "Removing control of information from the hands of the powerful and delivering it into the hands of the disempowered," Australian journalist Greg Bean's August 2019 commentary correlates the impact of Gutenberg's press with freedom of speech in the digital age: "It is the journalists from The Guardian and New York Times who should be in jail, not Julian Assange, said Mark Davis last week. The veteran Australian investigative journalist, who has been intimately involved in the Wikileaks drama, has turned the Assange narrative on its head."
Comparing Julian Assange to Johannes Gutenberg:
"As well as destroying religious control he destroyed political control, which was largely aligned with the Church across Europe. And then he destroyed the monopoly of the literate elite, creating educated populations where previously, powerful nobles had unchallenged control. Then, by supporting the local languages, all of which could be printed, he destroyed the dominance of Latin as the only language worth knowing." >>> more
Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921
for 'his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect'
rather than his more famous theory of relativity.
Harald Haas is working on it.
How LiFi Differs from RF wireless:
Read transcript
Harald Haas is the pioneer behind a new technology that can communicate as well as illuminate. "What if we could use existing technologies to provide Internet access to the more than 4 billion people living in places where the infrastructure can't support it?
Using off-the-shelf LEDs and solar cells, Harald Haas and his team have pioneered a new technology that transmits data using light, and it may just be the key to bridging the digital divide.
Take a look at what the future of the Internet could look like.">>> more
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) is being used to weld the hood of cars shut to keep engine software safe from mechanics.
Jennifer Granick posed these questions:
– Will we still have the Freedom to Tinker even in the oldest of technologies?
– What does it mean that the U.S. is a big player in the zero-day market even as international agreements seek to regulate exploit code and surveillance tools?
– Will we see liability for insecure software and what does that mean for open source?
– With advances in artificial intelligence that will decide who gets run over, who gets a loan, who gets a job, how far off can legal liability regimes for robots, drones, and even algorythms be?
– Is the global Internet headed for history's dustbin, and what does a balkanized network mean for security, for civil rights?
2011
The FCC, Net Neutrality and the Future Enrons of the Internet Apparently having learned nothing from its failure to rein in Enron, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and the rest, Congress is pushing to deregulate Internet service providers.
by Derek Lazzaro
Feb. 14, 2011, TruthDig
Excerpt:
. . . Consumer advocacy groups, some media companies and the FCC have pushed for various forms of regulation, saying that consumers must be protected from price gouging and the quasi-monopolistic telecommunications market, in which most consumers have only a handful of choices for Internet access.
Both sides of the debate have laid claim to the phase network neutrality. Internet service providers have said neutrality is defined by the ability of private companies to structure their services according to market conditions. Consumer groups have defined network neutrality in terms akin to the “common carrier” concept applied to telephone companies since 1934, saying that consumers should be able to pay for an open pipeline, without worrying about surcharges or interruptions based on disputes between pipeline providers.
In truth, this issue is not simple, and both sides have some valid points. ... >>more
The End of the Internet Dream Jennifer Granick, Fellow, The Center for Internet and Society (CIS), Stanford Law School: "Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology."
In 20 years, the Web might complete its shift from liberator to oppressor.
It’s up to us to prevent that.
Jennifer Granick was the keynote speaker at Black Hat 2015.
Excerpt from a modified version of her speech:
"The End of the Internet Dream"
But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom is dying.
For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.
Twenty years from now,
• You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago>>>more
Watch Jennifer Granick's speech: The Lifecycle of a Revolution Published on YouTube, Aug 10, 2015
Black Hat / YouTube notes: In the early days of the public internet, we believed that we were helping build something totally new, a world that would leave behind the shackles of age, of race, of gender, of class, even of law. Twenty years on, "cyberspace" looks a lot less revolutionary than it once did. Hackers have become information security professionals. Racism and sexism have proven resiliant enough to thrive in the digital world. Big companies are getting even bigger, and the decisions corporations - not just governments - make about security, privacy, and free speech affect hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people. The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse - terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers - are driving online policy as governments around the world are getting more deeply involved in the business of regulating the network. Meanwhile, the Next Billion Internet Users are going to connect from Asia and developing countries without a Bill of Rights. Centralization, Regulation, and Globalization are the key words, and over the next twenty years, we'll see these forces change digital networks and information security as we know it today. So where does that leave security, openness, innovation, and freedom?
Monopolisation of the Internet Commons Back to top
On the capture of the internet by large corporations
"If economic power is concentrated in a few powerful hands you have the political economy for feudalism, or authoritarianism, not democracy. ... When people tune out politics, they are not being hip or cool or ironic. They are being played." – Robert McChesney, University of Illinois Professor of Communications, specialising in “the history and political economy of communication, emphasizing the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies.”
We Need to Advocate Radical Solutions to Systemic Problems 04 January 2015
By Mark Karlin
Robert McChesney, a leader in challenging the corporate media's role in degrading democracy, carries on this fight with Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century, [2014]. In the book, he makes an urgent and compelling argument for ending communication monopolies and building a post-capitalist democracy that serves people over corporations.
Interview Excerpt: Mark Karlin:In a Truthout Progressive Pick of the Week interview in 2013 about your book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy[2013], you reflected profound pessimism about the capture of the internet by large corporations - and the evolution of net consumers into marketing "products." Is the trend of the co-option of the web by a few large corporations accelerating?
Robert McChesney:Whether the process is accelerating is a difficult question to measure or to answer. That the process exists and that it is the dominant fact about the internet is not controversial. Barring radical policy intervention, the domination of the internet by a handful of gigantic monopolists will continue and remain the order of the day. After Digital Disconnect was published, I had a meeting in October 2013 with Sue Gardner, who was then the person in charge of Wikipedia. Sue told me that it would be impossible for Wikipedia or anything like it to get launched by then, because the system was locked down by the giants and privileged commercial values. I was left with the impression that Wikipedia got in just before the deadline, so to speak.
What is striking about this corporate monopolization of the internet is that all the wealth and power has gone to a small number of absolutely enormous firms.As we enter 2015, 13 of the 33 most valuable corporations in the United States are internet firms, and nearly all of them enjoy monopolistic market power as economists have traditionally used the term.If you continue to scan down the list there are precious few internet firms to be found. There is not much of a middle class or even an upper-middle class of internet corporations to be found.
This poses a fundamental problem for democracy, though it is one that mainstream commentators and scholars appear reluctant to acknowledge: If economic power is concentrated in a few powerful hands you have the political economy for feudalism, or authoritarianism, not democracy. Concentrated economic power invariably overwhelms the political equality democracy requires, leading to routinized corruption and an end of the rule of law. That is where we are today in the United States.>>> more
Tim Berners-Lee calls for tighter regulation of online political advertising Inventor of the worldwide web described in an open letter how it has become a sophisticated and targeted industry, drawing on huge pools of personal data.
Olivia Solon, San Francisco
12 March 2017
Excerpt:
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web, has called for tighter regulation of online political advertising, which he says is being used in “unethical ways”.
“We urgently need to close the ‘internet blind spot’ in the regulation of political campaigning,” he said, writing in an open letter marking the 28th anniversary of his invention.
. . .
“The net result is that these sites show us content they think we’ll click on – meaning that misinformation, or fake news, which is surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases can spread like wildfire,” he said. This allows for people with bad intentions and “armies of bots” to game the system to spread misinformation for financial or political gain.
Berners-Lee said that the Web Foundation, the organisation he founded in 2009 dedicated to improvement and availability of the web, is working on these issues as part of a five-year strategy.
“It has taken all of us to build the web we have, and now it is up to all of us to build the web we want – for everyone.”>>>more
3.
“I Was Devastated”:
Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets. Berners-Lee has seen his creation debased by everything from fake news to mass surveillance. But he’s got a plan to fix it.
by Katrina Brooker, July 1, 2018, Vanity Fair
Excerpt
For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence. With an Oxonian wisp of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee appears the consummate academic—communicating rapidly, in a clipped London accent, occasionally skipping over words and eliding sentences as he stammers to convey a thought. His soliloquy was a mixture of excitement with traces of melancholy. Nearly three decades earlier, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. On this morning, he had come to Washington as part of his mission to save it. >>>more
Web’s inventor says news media bargaining code could break the internet.
He’s right — but there’s a fix Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University
January 21, 2021, The Conversation
Excerpt:
The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has raised concerns that Australia’s proposed News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code could fundamentally break the internet as we know it.
His concerns are valid. However, they could be addressed through minor changes to the proposed code.
How could the code break the web?
The news media bargaining code aims to level the playing field between media companies and online giants. It would do this by forcing Facebook and Google to pay Australian news businesses for content linked to, or featured, on their platforms.
In a submission to the Senate inquiry about the code, Berners-Lee wrote:
"Specifically, I am concerned that the Code risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online. […] The ability to link freely — meaning without limitations regarding the content of the linked site and without monetary fees — is fundamental to how the web operates."
Currently, one of the most basic underlying principles of the web is there is no cost involved in creating a hypertext link (or simply a “link”) to any other page or object online.
When Berners-Lee first devised the World Wide Web in 1989, he effectively gave away the idea and associated software for free, to ensure nobody would or could charge for using its protocols. >>>more
Norway's Finance Minister G20 2024 lecture 24 July 2024
"It was our experience with hydropower, inspired by the thinking of Henry George, which formed Norway’s approach to managing the newly discovered oil riches."- Minister of Finance Trygve Slagsvold Vedum
Taxing the riches of nature: sharing in the prosperity from national resources
. . .
Conclusion
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Your data: whose profit?
As you know, I am here for the G20-meeting, which Brazil is hosting now.
And I have to say, you are fantastic hosts.
It is really useful for Norway to join these meetings.
And I am happy to be here to share Norway’s experiences.
*
Now I want to connect these experiences to reflect on the global perspective.
Business is global, people are more connected across the world. We have started to think globally about tax.
Successfully!
And we are working together globally to develop solutions.
I have been talking about tax as a good thing.
As a Minister of Finance, I know very well that many do not think of tax that way.
But let me underline that fair taxes are good for society when used for the benefit of the people.
Brazil’s presidency of the G20 has put hunger and poverty at the top of the agenda. Together with sustainable development and a fair energy transition.
I warmly support Brazil’s agenda. Governments need revenues to achieve these important goals.
A good tax system and fair distribution is key to create a better society, a society for all.
This is why I hope the Norwegian experience can be useful.
The countries in the OECD and G20 - along with dozens of other countries - are cooperating to meet the challenges of taxing the digital economy.
Not least how to make sure that taxation is fair, both for business and citizens, in all our countries.
We have worked together for a long time to achieve harmonized rules.
These frameworks suit today’s digital business models, and hopefully the businesses of the future as well.
For me this work is interesting, and exciting.
And – in light of how we Norwegians have thought about taxing natural resources like water, oil and gas – I am also inspired to look into new issues for fair global taxation.
In the global digital economy, one sector with extraordinary profits is the tech companies.
They earn a lot of income from using the data of humans. It’s a digital natural resource, as I mentioned at the start.
Let’s return to the American thinker Henry George for a minute.
In the late nineteenth century when the railroad was expanding westwards, he was interested in the extraordinary income that could be generated, from the extra value of central land.
What if he had been alive today?
How would he have looked at the digital platforms and large-scale A.I. models?
Could we consider it as something like digital railroads?
A few companies earn their superprofits through building the digital infrastructure. And they depend on our data to generate profits.
Not just our joint digital history, but also our thoughts, emotions, expressions and interactions.
Everything your mobile phone and smart watch registers.
What you search for on the web.
Where you look on the screen. For how long.
How you are feeling.
What triggers your happiness, or what makes you angry.
The total of all of this is very valuable. Extremely valuable.
Thousands, millions, billions, of people join together on digital platforms – and just a handful of companies are controlling them.
The asset, the resource they can earn from, is me. And you. Our data. Our values.
Like the land, the oil, the waterfall, the power - our data is the resource.
It forms the basis for the super income the platform owners can extract.
And just imagine what A.I. is going to do with the potential to generate even more income from this precious resource.
Their business models only work because of data from you and me – and human history. Our common story. This is what adds the value.
So, should we be thinking of our collective data as the new jointly owned property? The natural resource?
And if this resource generates super-profit, how should these enormous values be shared?
Of course, the businesses who invest time, knowledge, capital - and take risks, should get returns for their efforts.
But shouldn’t we - at the same time - think that the value generated by using our common property, our data, should also come back to the global community?
To benefit society as a whole?
Is this a direction for sharing the wealth generated in our digital world today?
Can it be, that our data is a resource which generates superprofit, and is something which should be taxed across the worldwide digital economy?
I don’t have all the answers.
No person or country can answer it alone.
We need to continue working together internationally and find a joint approach.
Common challenges call for common solutions.
But I will say that our history in Norway shows that it is possible to create and share significant value from natural resources. And it can benefit both business and the people as a whole.
We must learn from our history and joint experience when we tackle these new challenges.
Data is different. While physical natural resources can be taxed nationally by individual countries, the digital world is global.
It needs global cooperation.
I want to ask: Is it fair, for a small number of people or businesses to become superrich from taking all the wealth generated by a natural resource – in this case data, from human thoughts and values?
I don’t think it is.
*
All of you have a mobile phone. In your bag, your hand or pocket right now.
Next time we look at our phones, let us all remember the value of our data.
And that we are a valuable resource.
We must find a fair way to distribute the financial gain from using our data, to the benefit of those who actually generate the resource. The true owners.
