The Internet by itself is not valuable for anybody. The Internet is valuable if it impacts in the life of the people. So this is what we have to work on every day.
Archive
None of us predicted YouTube, none of us predicted Facebook, none of us predicted Twitter, none of us predicted so many things we take for granted today. I’m not gonna get in the guessing game anymore. What I do think is, the more people of good intentions get involved in this, the more this becomes about people and less about profit, the better off we’ll be.
In 1993 when we first started talking about the digital divide and doing the work to define the digital divide, there were 15 million people on this planet on the Internet. Today there are 4 billion. A lot of people in this room did a lot of work to make that happen. But we have a lot that we need to do still.
I am deeply honored to be part of this year’s inductees into the Internet Hall of Fame and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Internet Society, an organization that has done so much to further the goals of an open and broadly-available Internet. I think we have a long way to go still.
I found that research globally is pointing out that women are 50% less likely to be connected to the Internet. And not just that. Even when they’re connected they’re 30 to 50% less likely to use it for personal empowerment. So much for Web For All, right?
The people who experience broader and more pervasive forms of social inequality related to housing, education, language proficiency, occupational opportunity and so forth, are also the ones who are most likely to be under-connected to the Internet.
What does it mean to be private when you’re in a place where you have no right to privacy but are ironically deprived of the thing that makes your privacy go away?