Public Service Internet notes

Bill Thompson:

I'm currently ensconced in BBC R&D - I used be head of the Archive Development partnership team - but what I want to do is use IP based servce to make society better, rather thna just making broadcasting better

Solana Larsen:

I was an editor with Global voices, changing the balance of power about who gets to make history.

More recently I have been thinking about what went wrong with the internet, and worked with Mozilla on the Internet Health Report

we want to help people navigate the minefields and find the places where the internet is still an opportunity - how the internet adapts to our choices and how we measure what is going wrong

there are a lot of things going well wiht the interenet despite a lot fo us being down on it now https://internethealthreport.org/

the mission of public service broadcast was never just to make TV programs, but to do more

not just in the UK, but in Germany and Denmark, public broadcast is discouraged from doing anything on the internet as it is competition with commercial entities and this is stunting progress

Meghan McDermott:

What are the values that resonate for you?

q:

Inform and educate matters

broadcast started with great ideas and was about public service, but it has become about broadcasting

Ultimately this is all about trust and how trusts transcends these forms

Solana Larsen:

Funding is key too - whose role is it to pay for these things? It is the consumer that pays for the internet- why isn't it free

Wendy M. Grossman:

the internet started out as a cooperative where everyone paid for their piece of it

Bill Thompson:

the BBC was not created ot make radio and television programmes, but to deliver the goals of Educate, inform and entertain - radio and TV are no longere th ebst way to achieve these goals

Is the BBc's understanding of an internet that serves the public good the same as everyone else's - it's not clear if our perspective will scale

I was profoundly effected by Larry Lessig's book Code - that code is law, and we can change it. It's not the messiah, it's just a very naughty network

Meghan McDermott:

why is the conversation happening now, who is the we and who is the they?

Solana Larsen:

I'm worried about the global dystopian surveillance society, and anyone who reads the newspaper can see this now - free speech, freedom of movement everything is at risk

No-one says that "the medium is the message" any more, but it is still true we need to see

q:

I mostly work with US government funding in media access - we want to make it independent and viable

this reminds me of the history of the london underground where each line was owned by a separate company, before we realised that public ownership made sense

I'm from canada- the canadian govt made internet access a basic right, but it didn't change much?

Bill Thompson:

Access to what - today's interent si no always healthy

q:

one is about equity - everyone having access, but also a commons, a collective good

What internet are we talking about? facebook and surveillance, about access to IP routing ot about where computers are on borders

Bill Thompson:

All the way down the stack - I think we need to rewrite TCP/IP to build a stack with public service virtues

Solana Larsen:

It's access, infrastructure, how it works - all the layers

Meghan McDermott:

If it was functioning well, how woudl we know?

Bill Thompson:

Trust and confidence - it would be significantly harder for anyone other than state actors to subvert what you are routing to

the sorts of things that you end up building to make a public service internet can also enable surveillance

Wendy M. Grossman:

were you prorposing to blow up capitalism?

Kevin Marks:

I think we do need to woarry about nation state actors as they have clearly been working to subvert the publci internet values

Wendy M. Grossman:

can we just get rid of the web?

Kevin Marks:

the web isn't the problem, we have a parallel app economy that defines an overlay on it that undermines its values

q:

freedom and security are 2 things we need - the more you protect free speech, the mroe you allow crime at speed - fraud at unprecedented scales

when you are thinking about the kinds of things we want to protect - we may not like having 10 different apps to talk to people, but that canbe undermined by governments too

Meghan McDermott:

is it an either/or or a yes and? Who should be at the table - how do we not use language to mean different things?

Solana Larsen:

you need to have politics, technology and civil society in the room, people how see things form different sides

Bill Thompson:

you also need to bring in the people who don't see the benefits - if they are building silos or benefiting politically from them

you . don't want to pitch this as an alternative to, but a choice - you can choose the existing chaos

build something that can grow through use ratehr than be imposed

Wendy M. Grossman:

the growth of people joining the internet has dramatically slowed - the last half of the world is getting online more slowly, and people left out are disproportionally rural poor and women

q:

Should be public service internets - you decide how much you give up

Meghan McDermott:

there is ggin to be contradictions in the way we define the public

MitchellBaker:

we touched on this- the question of scope of public matters - is it a utopia we live in, or is it about the commons - getting to that is key

q:

it's about the roadmap - small and successful first then the roadmap is more ambitious

Bill Thompson:

the values we put up a couple of months back have not been validated -they are working hypotheses to be tested

we need to start from somewhere - write then edit

the values we talk about here https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/public-service-internet are about making life better

our 4 principle are Public-Controlled Data Equal Access for Everyone A Healthy Digital Public Sphere and Public Service Networking

q:

borders and boundaries matter too - does the BBC see it ending within its own border? Does the World Service matter too?

sometimes public services have competing interests - do I take a bit of Deutsche Welle, RTA and BBC is it just about the country

Bill Thompson:

The BBC has a great desire to find something else to replace their vanishing business model

Kevin Marks:

there are multiple publics - not a public and we need to bring them all in

Bill Thompson:

we're trying to engage in a conversation about what a public service internet should be because the BBC needs it, but the rest of us too - we have some convening power to bring people in

q:

do we need a decentralised organisation rather than a centralised one like the BBC?

Solana Larsen:

I want to hear how other organisations are talking about public service - it's not something I hear in american conversations

Bill Thompson:

the first thing that will be useful to get outof today is whether "public service internet" is a useful way of modelling

q:

I want to go all the way to a decentralised web of mutual currencies - do we want that

Bill Thompson:

it needs to be a network that people have chosen, not enforced

Ian Forrester | cubicgarden@mastodon@cloud:

its important to have those out there topics as well as thinking about what internet you would like to see

A big question I always have is what the user experience implications are

Solana Larsen:

what would a public service email service look like - the same for social media - what does that look like?

Kevin Marks:

I think it looks like indieweb.org tbh

Wendy M. Grossman:

the BBC built an ISP in the 1990s