BERs input (Re: Input for 'Future of the Internet' - 10 April)

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hello!

Am Freitag, 8. April 2016 12:08:34 schrieb Matthias Kirschner:
> From all we heard it is very helpful if you spent a few
> minutes and submit your ideas.
> 
http://k7r.eu/urgent-help-until-10-april-to-influence-how-750-millions-will-be-spent/

I had about 45 Minutes to phrase my reply, I still hope it is useful.

Best,
Bernhard
ps.: resend because my first attempt did not seem to have made it.

== Details, of BER's submission to  
https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/nextgen-internet

== Your occupation and expertise

Entrepreneur, Company owner for Security and complex applications.
Academic grades: Dipl. Applied System Scientist (University of Osnabrück, 
DE), MSc. Geographie (University of Milwaukee, US)
More Details: http://intevation.de/~bernhard/index.en.html

== Status of the Internet in 2016
The internet is an important backbone of society and overall humanity.

Net Neutrality is very important because only competition will enable 
smaller companies to be innovative and this is what Net Neutrality is about. 
There is a trend to more mobile devices and internet via mobile phone 
networks. Open Standards, like the IETFs RFCs have enabled the success of the 
internet, as have Free Software implementations like sendmail, the TCP/IP 
stack that Microsoft integrated, the Apache Webserver and Web Browsers.
There is a tendency to analyse data traffic and offer advertisments and 
content which shifts power to large software and "content" providers outside 
of Europe.

== View towards 2025 and beyond
=== How do you think the internet will look like in 2025 and beyond?

It is still there with many more devices and it will be still decentral.
It is very hard to predict the development over a time frame of 10 years
as the last 10 years have shown that we will see disruptive changes 
because of business models or policital events.

In a negative scenario corporations and autocratic countries
will have gained more influence.

In an optimistic scenario self-confident countries
like the EU will have grown technical, political and business power
to shape the future for their citizens via a democratic process,
protecting privacy and people's interest. Maybe even a charter
of human internet rights will be developed.

=== What will be the essential functional building blocks of the Internet 
then?

Open access, open standards, regulation that aims for the balance 
of power of smaller organisations and people versus larger organisations
and governments.

Free Software technology that offers software and hardware building
blocks so that run the basic infrastructure from the network to
the application layers.

=== Could you indicate where we should focus our activity research in the 
next 5-10 years to achieve? Are there new field of research to 
create/develop?


In order to enable privacy, research should look into a "proxy world", 
where the use of proxy businesses and technology will enable business 
models based on data without compromising individual privacy. This will 
have to be supported by technology and regulations.

Consider a business practive in Germany where pharmacies cannot be 
directly be coupled with medial doctors in order to support and offer an 
infrastructure that maintains decentral distribution of medial drugs.
The same could be done for example with a video stream provider which 
would be force to run their stream through a business proxy, where a 
number of users for a city buys their stream and the data will be 
anonymized. The video vendor gets (most of)) the wanted data (which TV-
show is watched how often), can even sell advertisment, but does not know 
the single customer, whos privacy is protected.

Another area is trusted computing, where research is necessary how 
regulation can force sure that each owner or intermediate can add their 
own trust anchor certificates in the chain for their devices or 
application. So that Google, Apple and Microsoft do not control the 
certificates for what can run on a certain machine.
Example: If you want to run a webserver, you need a certificate that is 
within the common browsers, Microsoft is the main gatekeeper for this.

Second example: With "secure boot" or "app stores" only binary can be run 
that the providers of the software allow. Thus Apple controls the apps 
that can run on Smartphones  and the Google Play store is the only app 
store on Android phones that can update applications all together 
automatically, other stores are second class.

A third area is open standards that adhere to the minimalistic design 
criteria
for data exchange formats, which is important for competition and 
security.
See my article 
https://fsfe.org/activities/os/minimalisticstandards.en.html .

A fourth area will be anonymous micropayment models, so that small
content providers would have the ability to create business models
without special right holding organisation like the German GEMA.




-- 
FSFE -- Founding Member of the GA            blogs.fsfe.org/bernhard
Support our work for Free Software:     https://fsfe.org/support/?ber
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