There’s lots of fears. So one major fear would be privacy. So privacy is something which we used to take for granted. Now we cannot. The other major fear I have is centralization.
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The main fear I have, and I believe most of my colleagues have, is to see the Internet more fragmented than it is, and much more fragmented than we wanted it to be. When we designed it, we developed technology which was due to be open, which means that everyone knows the technology, everyone can develop it, and everyone can improve it as well.
One of the key challenges is the language barrier. In Africa there are three major languages spoken, or used in professional environments: French, English, some Portuguese. And trying to bring the community from all those different language backgrounds to focus on a project like AFRINIC was hard.
I was getting a bit annoyed with the fact that I was traveling to universities all over the country and always had to go through all kinds of trouble to get online. You may not know this but back in the time you would have to register your MAC address at the IT center of the university or get a card to stick into your laptop. And it was such a hassle and I thought, but why?
If you’re looking to the question how can the whole thing be regulated, how can one get control of this whole environment, so as to create a world in which those original freedoms that Barlow was talking about are shared by everyone, the answer is you can’t do it.
The power of data has never been bigger than it is today and I think this can be a great thing, even though it is also creating some existential risks.
Self-sovereign identity is what sits in the middle enabling individuals to manage all these different relationships in a way that is significantly less complex than each of those institutions needing to have a business relationship with each other to see those credentials.
One very interesting addition to the public space is how we are conditioning and defining the public space with regards to eventual attacks. And it’s changing the landscape radically. And the very first knee-jerk reaction was concrete blocks in front of many institutions. Now they’re trying to design these concrete blocks so they seem something which is part of the landscape but the presence and the robustness is still so violent that it’s hard to hide the intention.
Citizenship, after not thinking about it for a while, feels like something we’re all thinking about quite a lot these days. In the words of Hannah Arendt, citizenship is the right to have rights. All of your rights essentially descend from your citizenship, because only countries will protect those rights.
First of all, let’s recognize that the privacy of transaction records is not a brand new issue at all. We have many decades of experience, and I think it helps to understand that we have two types of consumer transaction records that we’re talking about.