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.
(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
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.
Vint Cerf in 2019 (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Webby Award)
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.”
Cerf, however, pointed out that P2P architectures often cope poorly with a surge in demand: “There is a scaling issue.” In other words, giant data centers don’t exist only because of Mark Zuckerberg’s megalomania. “Some of this is just forced on us by the scale of the operation,” he said.
The EFF’s Cohn cited copyright, saying that courts should have stuck to “code is speech” logic when deciding cases involving the P2P platforms Stokes had remembered fondly. “There’s a robust scientific conversation that takes place in computer languages,” she said. “Speech has always included science.”
But in cases like the 2005 decision that effectively shut down the file-sharing service Grokster, the Supreme Court disagreed, holding that Grokster promoting itself as a way to get music for free made it liable for the infringement committed by its users.
“The peer-to-peer conversation is actually where it went wrong,” Cohn said. “This idea that copyright is more powerful than science won.”
Get Our Best Stories!
Your Daily Dose of Our Top Tech News
By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
‘A Game With Many Winners’
That teed up the Internet Archive’s Kahle to discuss its work to digitize analog works and make them available through its site. “Do we have these books on the internet anywhere?” he asked, gesturing at the hardbound volumes on the shelves around the stage. “And the answer is no.”
(Many of those dusty tomes looked old enough to have entered the public domain, so the answer in many cases would actually be yes.)
Having so much older content locked up beyond one copyright wall or another hasn’t made the world smarter, he argued: “The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free.”
The Supreme Court wasn’t any more hospitable to that logic in 2024, when it held that the San Francisco-based Archive’s venture into scanning printed books it had purchased and loaning digital copies of them violated publishers’ copyrights. That leaves libraries compelled to buy digital copies subject to whatever lending limitations publishers impose. “The decision was a mistake,” Cohn said. “Let digital works be in libraries in the same way as physical works.”
Panel moderator Luke Hogg, director of technology policy at FAI, a San Francisco-based nonprofit formerly known as Lincoln Labs, asked panelists if they saw reasons for optimism.
Recommended by Our Editors
Stokes volunteered that while “the feed has replaced the home page,” self-publishing on the web still works: “You can still do a domain name, you can still do a startup, you can still get some virality.”
Kahle shared some hope for decentralization, saying “Let’s have a game with many winners.”
The Internet Archive, which recently passed 1 trillion pages archived, has done its part by using the Filecoin decentralized-web network to store much of its data. Nobody, however, brought up the rise of decentralized and federated social-media platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon.
“We could get back to actual competition policy and enforcing antitrust laws,” Cohn suggested. “I don’t want to just have to pledge my allegiance to one or the other, Apple or Google.”
Google’s own market power came up during the audience Q&A when Luther Lowe—formerly Yelp’s public-policy head during that platform’s more aggressive pushback against Google’s conduct, now handling policy for the startup incubator Y Combinator—asked Cerf about Google’s AI Overviews, and suggested they they are “slowly…de-oxygenat[ing]” the open web.
“The question makes it sound like I have some authority,” Cerf replied. “I am willing to be an advocate of openness wherever I can, but that’s probably as much as I’m able to do.”
Further back-and-forth about competition and copyright led Kahle to observe that “something’s gone really, really wrong” and then try to end the discussion on a positive note: “Let’s build a better internet.”
How to do that had to be left as an exercise for the audience.
About Our Expert
Experience
Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
Read Full Bio
