Hi, peo­ple. It’s a big hall in here. Ethan, that was won­der­ful. Thank you so very much. And it’s mak­ing my life very easy. I’m not a par­tic­u­lar­ly good speak­er. I tell peo­ple that what I try to do is to speak with the peo­ple that are here. So I don’t have great slides to show you. I don’t have great things to share with you, but I want to take you on a jour­ney. I want you to come with me. It’s inter­est­ing that Ethan has talked to us about what is hap­pen­ing today with the sys­tems, with the norms and insti­tu­tions in place. But what I want you to do with me is look at the Web yes­ter­day, today, and tomor­row. Yesterday, today, and tomor­row. That’s what I’m going to talk about. 

I nor­mal­ly say my name is Nenna and I come from the Internet. Some fif­teen years ago, I was just a fresh grad­u­ate and I real­ly want­ed to get my hands work­ing. I want­ed to make myself bet­ter. And I went to learn to write HTML. Then, I nev­er knew… They did­n’t even give me the his­to­ry of HTML. I nev­er knew who Tim Berners-Lee was. Then lat­er on I’m like, ​“Oh…That is him.” 

Okay, so I could write HTML and all of that. But now I work with the Web Foundation basi­cal­ly doing three things. We work on access, mak­ing sure that every­one gets access the Internet. We will talk about that with you. We work on voic­es, speak­ing about rights online and offline. And we work on par­tic­i­pa­tion, on data, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty to use the Internet to engage at all lev­els, which is part of what Ethan was speak­ing with us today. This is what I do at the Web Foundation, apart from being an Internet junkie, like I said. Get con­nect­ed, every­where, every time, oth­er­wise I would go crazy.

But what I want to ask you first all is how many peo­ple used num­bers instead of DNS? How many peo­ple were here before the DNS days? Ethan is one of those, okay. I need to salute all of those. The Web has only been about twenty-five years old. How many of us here are less than twenty-five? How many of us are less than twenty-five? Okay.

Now, project. In fif­teen years’ time, in ten, fif­teen years’ time, it’s going to be 2030. How many of you are going to come back to Internetdagarna 2030? Now, we are all big liars. No one knows if we’ll be there, any­how. But hey, I plan to be. I hope you will be. And we’re going to be look­ing at a new set of people.

Now, if you are speak­ing with a fif­teen year-old today, I think some of us have seen that video of where the girl was ask­ing how exact­ly do you drop a phone? How do you…? What is it? Why is it this way? So in fif­teen years, I will have in Africa—because most of us did not have the fixed line—you will have a hell of a time explain­ing to your child, ​“This is what the tele­phones looked like in the year 1990.” They’ll be like, ​“Why would any­one be using this?” You’ll be like, ​“Shut up! This was wealth in those days.”

But let me tell you some­thing. When I was younger, my par­ents did­n’t have a fixed line. When I went to uni­ver­si­ty, I would call some­one in town, this Sunday. And they would find a way to send a mes­sage to my par­ents over the week. And then I would call back next Sunday. So I had to spend two Sundays for me to be able to speak to my par­ents on the phone.

So the first ques­tion is access. What was access yes­ter­day? What is access today? Who has access? That’s the first ques­tion. I have a pho­to here I would like to share with you. It’s a pho­to of a horse up in the skies.

So we have this, it’s put up by one of the projects in Latin America. At the moment, only a third of the world pop­u­la­tion is online. What do we mean? We’re say­ing that Europe is online, and the North and a big part of South America, they are online. But what does that mean? It just means that only two out of sev­en bil­lion peo­ple have the rights to Internet access for the moment.

So the ques­tion would be what is going to hap­pen in fif­teen years? Fifteen years ago, I remem­ber how I used to get con­nect­ed. Who remem­bers how they were con­nect­ing fif­teen years ago? What did you use? Modems, dial up. [mim­ics the sound of a phone dial­ing and modem nois­es] Yeah, that’s what I used as well. So, we’ve come from those days to ADSL, to WiFi, to MiFi, and I don’t know what it is we’re using— Mostly we’re using them data packs here, and WiFi at the moment. What are we going to be using to con­nect, next fif­teen years? We’ll come to that.

But who is online at the moment? In Europe, there are about fifty-odd coun­tries, and about 725 mil­lion peo­ple. That’s about the pop­u­la­tion of Europe at the moment—at the most 750. What’s the largest coun­try in Europe in terms of pop­u­la­tion? In Europe—I’m not talk­ing about the EU. Russia is. Russia has about 144 mil­lion, 145 mil­lion. Let’s talk about that. But Nigeria has more than 170 mil­lion, and there are only about 40% of Nigerians who are connected.

The sec­ond most pop­u­lous coun­try in Europe is Germany. Germany has about 81 mil­lion. A lot of Germans are con­nect­ed. Who knows the second-most pop­u­lous coun­try Africa? [no vis­i­ble response] Come on. People are con­nect­ed here. You can find— I found all of this this morn­ing when I was prepar­ing for a speech. The sec­ond most pop­u­lous coun­try in Africa is Ethiopia. Now, I don’t expect a lot of hands this time. Who has an idea of the pop­u­la­tion of Ethiopia? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? Ninety mil­lion. There are more peo­ple in Ethiopia than there are in Germany. But 10% of them, only, are con­nect­ed to the Internet. Ten per­cent of 90 mil­lion peo­ple. So there’s a whole bunch— In fact, the num­ber of peo­ple that are not con­nect­ed to the Internet in Ethiopia is the same as the whole of the pop­u­la­tion of Germany.

Think ahead, in 2030. Internetdagarna 2030, that’s what we’re talk­ing about. Let’s say there will be about 70, 80% of Ethiopians who are con­nect­ed. What would that be, then? Think ahead. Let’s say there will be about 90% of Nigerians who are con­nect­ed. There are a bil­lion peo­ple in Africa are con­nect­ed. Let’s say that there will be able at 750 mil­lion Africans con­nect­ed to broad­band Internet. We need to begin to think of the pro­grams we will show up here in Internetdagarna 2030. That’s the pro­gram we’re mak­ing now.

So we’re look­ing at more peo­ple con­nect­ed. We’re look­ing at Asia. India has 1.2 bil­lion, and China has 1.3 bil­lion. So in fif­teen years’ time, the con­nec­tion we had ten, fif­teen years won’t be there any­more. The con­nec­tion we have now…you know when you hop into the plane and they’re like, ​“Could you please switch off all devices.” And then you have to be offline. I’m not doing any adverts, but I real­ly love fly­ing Emirates, and any oth­er air­line that has onboard WiFi, because I need to keep sane when I’m doing long trav­els. So real­ly, I don’t think that in 2030 when we’re com­ing to Stockholm or any oth­er city, by the way, for Internetdagarna, we’ll be fly­ing in planes where we have to put off our devices. That’s for sure; I hope I don’t have to. So we can­not real­ly get con­nect­ed to every­one, because not every­body is con­nect­ed. We can­not con­nect every time, because there are places where we are told that we can­not connect.

Image via Facebook, ​“Visualizing Friendships”

I’d like to show a sec­ond slide. I think most of us have seen this image one way or the oth­er. It’s by Facebook. It was done some three years ago. It’s the live cap­ture of Facebook con­nec­tions at a giv­en time of the day. So you see the places where peo­ple are con­nect­ed. And you see where I come from, which is West Africa. So you see how the upper parts of the image are slight­ly more con­nect­ed than the low­er part of the image. 

So in 2030, we’re look­ing at a time when all of the plan­et, it will be light­ed up. But the thing about this image I would like to share is that when we go online, what do we access? What’s the con­tent? Who remem­bers what we were access­ing online fif­teen years ago, what we were using the Internet for? Emails. News. Chatting, yeah. I was out of high school, and I was a second-year stu­dent. I want­ed to check out boys. Me, all the time, that’s what I want­ed to do. Fashion, those kind of things.

The first project I had online was to mount a foot­ball team. Something I could­n’t have done with my means on the ground, because I’m a foot­ball fan. But the ques­tion here is con­tent. What were we access­ing on the Internet then, and what what are we access­ing on the Internet today? Today, what do we not do on the Internet, will be the ques­tion. What do we not do on the Web. Travel, edu­ca­tion, busi­ness, com­merce, bank­ing, friends, fam­i­ly, all of those we do online today.

But then the ques­tion is what will we be doing by Internetdagarna 2030? Should we even hold one phys­i­cal­ly? Maybe that’s the ques­tion. Because if all of us are con­nect­ed and we can have hyper, super Internet speed, should we be meet­ing face to face? I don’t know what it is going to be in 2030.

But what I want to ask us here is what are peo­ple access­ing online? What were they access­ing online? What are we access­ing online today? We are more into audio-visuals. We have more videos today. We have more active things. We have more of data. We have more of heavy stuff. How many of us saw that image of a 4 megabyte dri­ve being hauled by six men car­ry­ing it? You know how it feels. But now, if some­one gives you a 2 giga­byte don­gle, what would you do with it? Nothing. I need like 16 gig, 24, 64…stocking is the big deal. And some­one says for fifty years of human­i­ty, all of the knowl­edge we cre­at­ed was pro­duced by the Internet in less than five years. And they can fit in here. [indi­cates index fin­ger] and you go away with it.

So I’m look­ing at con­tent in the next thir­ty years. It’s going to be huge. It’s going to be big­ger than what it is now. And if we add that to the num­ber of peo­ple who would already be con­nect­ed, then we are going boom. 

I would like to share one oth­er image with us. That’s the hand of some­one. The thought I would like to share with us about this is about shad­ows and light. This time last week I was in Brussels. I was in Brussels con­sult­ing with an EU mem­ber about their cyber diplo­ma­cy, if I should use that word. And I live in Africa, where for one thing or anoth­er there is an Internet shut­down. Most of us have been to places where you can­not access cer­tain con­tent online. So we’re not sure whether we’re liv­ing in the state of light, or in the state of shadows.

Last year, when Turkey, the Turkey that has been men­tioned— And what hap­pened is that because there is some state-level cen­sor­ship, even ISPs have tak­en the lib­er­ty to include their own cen­sor­ship, and every­one is cen­sor­ing every­one, for what­ev­er rea­son they find suit­able for them­selves. And so we are there on a UN meet­ing, the Internet Governance Forum, but we’re hold­ing a side meet­ing in a hotel. And you find that even the UN web site could not be accessed from one of the hotels in Istanbul because prob­a­bly the ISP of the hotel itself or some­one some­where said ​“polit­i­cal con­tent.” Oh yeah? I thought this coun­try was host­ing this event. And one of our ini­tia­tives, Web We Want…polit­i­cal content.

Yeah, I under­stand that that is an advo­cate site. But quite a num­ber of things hap­pen when you can­not access all of the Internet. We can­not tell peo­ple, ​“Oh, because there is a ter­ror­ist attack in XYZ, we’ll clamp down on the Internet.” And I’m speak­ing to us here in Stockholm. Because things are hap­pen­ing in the EU in the past one week, that before you even wake up next week a whole lot of laws would have been passed and we don’t have the ener­gy to engage on it. Because we are told this is the fence, this is secu­ri­ty, this is hyper-important. We can­not argue with the insti­tu­tions. We can not engage with the insti­tu­tions, because we are told it’s just some­thing that has to be done at the moment. If we con­tin­ue going this way, if we con­tin­ue mak­ing Web access to indi­vid­u­als a game of shad­ows and dark­ness, light and dark, shad­ow and that, where will we be in 2030?

Ethan talked about insti­tu­tions. He talked about cod­ing. He talked about mar­kets. He talked about norms. But if we do not come down on the things that mat­ter to human beings, where will we be in 2030?

Today we have media. Today we have ser­vices. And I under­stand there’s a group here work­ing on the Internet of Things. That is the future of the Internet. Today we are access­ing the Internet from our mobiles. We’re access­ing the Internet from our homes. We’re access­ing the Internet on WiFi. What will it be tomor­row? I’m look­ing at a tomor­row of ubiq­ui­tous Internet access. Tomorrow when almost every­one will be online. Not almost, every­body. Why not? Everyone who wants to be online should be online, should have broad­band Internet access.

But I’m afraid. I’m afraid because there’s a big debate going on in encryp­tion. Who are the peo­ple work­ing on encryp­tion here? Okay, not a lot of us. By the time we have six out of the sev­en bil­lion glob­al pop­u­la­tion online, by the time we have extend­ed con­tent avail­able online, by the time we have high-speed Internet at very low cost, my fear is that we will have greater chal­lenges man­ag­ing iden­ti­ty. Because most of the things we’ll do, we’ll be doing them online. 

So what are we going to do with iden­ti­ty? What will be the future of anonymi­ty and encryp­tion? What would we have rights to do, and rights to not be shown to do? Where will be the lines between pri­va­cy and ​“pub­lic sur­veil­lance?” And if we can sousveil­lance, at what extent? These are the things we need to begin to think of even today.

I want to close with anoth­er one, the Internet for all. As we sit here in 2015, I will look for­ward to 2030. There are ques­tions we have to ask our­selves. What will hap­pen when every­one gets the Internet? What will hap­pen when the Internet becomes open for all? What will hap­pen when we can access all of the Internet? I don’t know exact­ly what will hap­pen to every­one, but I know that there will be increase in eco­nom­ic emer­gence for many peo­ple. I know there’ll be increase in com­mu­ni­ca­tion capac­i­ties in edu­ca­tion. I know that human­i­ty will ben­e­fit from an open Internet for every­one. I know that as we sit here, we will all ben­e­fit from it.

Whether we are activists like myself, because the Web would allow us to con­nect with oth­er peo­ple. Whether we are the norm-setters, we will see that par­tic­i­pa­tion, mobi­liza­tion, will not only be nation­al but glob­al. Whether we’re writ­ing code—I’m from the open source world—we’ll find that it will be indeed a com­mu­ni­ty. And whether we’re oper­at­ing in the mar­ket, we know that one bil­lion in Africa is a bet­ter mar­ket for only 750 mil­lion in Europe.

As we begin to think about Internetdagarna 2030, I would like to chal­lenge us to do some­thing. When we work at the Web Foundation for access to be giv­en to every­one, it is not just as a work of activists. It is because we believe that part of the future of the world lies in every­one hav­ing access to the Internet. When we say that the rights that peo­ple have offline should also be applied online, it is because we know that the respect of human rights is the basis on which the Internet of the future can reli­ably move for­ward. And we say you should not cut off part of the Internet, or shut down the Internet for any rea­son. It is because we believe that inher­ent­ly human beings are free beings, and we want open­ness in archi­tec­ture, we want open­ness in access, we want open­ness for the Internet.

My boss Tim Berners-Lee says the Internet is for every­one. This is for all of us. And per­son­al­ly, I always say my name is Nenna, I’m from the Internet. You must have heard it from me that we have to [?], that every­body, every­one, all of the peo­ple, should be able and free to access all parts of the Internet for all of their needs whether they be social, cul­tur­al, or com­mer­cial. And at no point in time should one part of the Internet be cut off from the peo­ple. And that is why we say all of the peo­ple, all of the Internet, all of the time.

Are you a coder? Are you devel­op­ing prod­ucts? Are you devel­op­ing RFCs, stan­dards and norms? Are you advis­ing law­mak­ers? Are you a law­mak­er your­self? Are you an activist for human rights? Are you cre­at­ing con­tent? Are you orga­niz­ing and con­ven­ing like we’re doing here? What exact­ly is your role? Are you a DNS reg­is­trar? What exact­ly is our role, that is the question.

The one good thing is that the Internet does not ask you whether you’re male or female, whether you’re old or young, whether you’re tall or short, whether you’re African or European. The Internet is in need of human beings, and one of those is you seat­ed here today. So I would like to call you to join me to work for an open Internet that will be open for all, all the time. That all of the peo­ple should have access to all of the Internet, all of the time. All of the Internet, all of the, all of the time. And that was me in Stockholm. Thanks. 

Moderator: So, we’ve got a ques­tion from the audi­ence that I would like to ask you. There is some amaz­ing leapfrog­ging hap­pen­ing in Africa at the moment, which is enabled by the Internet. Can you share one of those sto­ries and also how you see these spur future developments?

Nnenna Nwakanma: Is that from…[Nirani?]

Moderator: Yes.

Nwakanma: Hi, where are you? Good to have you here. A lot of things are hap­pen­ing. Like I was say­ing, some of us did not have the fixed-line tele­phone. So there is no point going into the fixed-line tele­phone any­more. A lit­tle sto­ry: I was walk­ing in Burundi. Burundi’s a very sad coun­try now. That was 5 years ago. And so we went to a place to install their very first Internet con­nec­tion. And you called a chief of the vil­lage. We installed the Internet con­nec­tion in a school. And so the chief came. And before then, we asked him, ​“Where is your son?” ​“Oh, my son is in Europe somewhere.” 

So we called the man on Skype, the young man liv­ing in Europe. Of course it was on video. And the father was look­ing at him. ​“Is it real? Can he see me now?” We said yeah. He says, ​“What time is it there?” Then the man said, ​“If you can see me, describe what I’m wear­ing.” And he says, ​“You’re wear­ing… And there’s this per­son besides…” He said, ​“Now I can die in peace.” 

So that is how shock­ing it was to him. So, I can keep in con­tact with my fam­i­ly. For peo­ple who live in Stockholm, for peo­ple who live in Central Europe who’ve had com­mu­ni­ca­tions all the time, you don’t know what it means for an old man to see his son who he has­n’t seen for ten, fif­teen years. Someone in North and South Korea, may be able to tell you what it means. And these are things that very sim­ple Internet con­nec­tion can do.

You know, when I’m here and they tell me, ​“Your moth­er is sick in Africa,” and I’m like okay, take her to the hos­pi­tal. And they’re like, ​“We can’t pay for the bills.” I’m like, get down there. I’m call­ing the doc­tor on Skype or I don’t know what. And I’m like give me your account num­ber. And as I’m speak­ing with him on my phone I’m log­ging into my online por­tal and I’m pay­ing the hos­pi­tal bill from wher­ev­er I am. That alone gives my moth­er an extra ten years of life. You know what it meant.

In the US they have sys­tems they don’t trust. In Nigeria and West Africa we don’t even have sys­tems. So, in places where you don’t have sys­tems, that is where you build your trust on the Internet. So folks, for peo­ple like us who come from the Internet, we actu­al­ly have great trust in tech­nol­o­gy. And it is up to any of us here not to dis­ap­point those of us whose 90% trust is on the Internet.

I work for an office that is based in Washington DC but I live in West Africa. Most of my life is online. Most of my work is online. Were it not for the Internet, maybe I would’ve been job­less or in jail, because I’m orig­i­nal­ly an Internet activist.