Intertitle: What are your hopes for the future Internet? Your fears? What action should be tak­en now for the best future?

Michael Stanton: The tech­nol­o­gy which enables net­works is advanc­ing strong­ly at the moment. You see this most­ly in the devel­op­ment of opti­cal net­works and also of radio net­works with 5G progress which is going on at the moment. And so these are going to make it pos­si­ble to make net­work­ing cheap­er by pro­vid­ing more capac­i­ty or for enabling use by more peo­ple for doing more com­plex things. These are good things. 

The R&D net­works, the research and edu­ca­tion net­works, have to accom­pa­ny this. I mean, if the research and edu­ca­tion net­work is not capa­ble of offer­ing ser­vices which are more advanced than the com­mer­cial net­works, then the rea­son for hav­ing them tends to go away. 

And this is some­thing which we believe has to be stressed, that there are users which can­not be served by the com­mer­cial net­works at the moment at a decent price. Everything even­tu­al­ly comes down to price and the idea of being able to have aggre­gat­ed net­works which can be used by high-performance users as well as the less-aggressive peo­ple, if you like, can be built and oper­at­ed eco­nom­i­cal­ly if you have the right con­di­tions. And so we have to offer the attrac­tions, and the attrac­tion in this case is the per­for­mance which you can offer to them on the coverage. 

About prob­lems, the prob­lem which is obvi­ous­ly well-known is that of secu­ri­ty, net­work secu­ri­ty. And there is a dif­fi­cul­ty because we can’t…well, we suf­fer from prob­lems of pri­va­cy and pro­tec­tion against finan­cial and oth­er crimes done remote­ly. I’ve had a num­ber of personal…how shall I put it, inci­dents in recent times. My bank for­tu­nate­ly is very smart and has found ways of being able to detect rapid­ly that some­thing’s not quite right, and has noti­fied me and tak­en steps and so on.