It’s the fourth and final day of the Fast Company Innovation Festival, and it’s been an action-packed week. My last full-length session was titled “Digital Defense: The Battle for an Open and Secure Internet.” I sat down with execs from Mozilla, the ACLU, and Cloudflare, each of whom came at the topic from a unique angle. #FCFestival
For my last question, I asked them each to make a prediction about the future of the Internet that terrifies them, excites them, or both. The first two responses below are terrifying, but stick with it: We end on an upbeat note.
💥 Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Senior Staff Technologist, ACLU
"You've probably all heard the term filter bubble, right? I'm concerned about the filter bubble becoming a cage. If every device that you connect to on the Internet knows exactly who you are and tries to tune itself to fit exactly who you are, we basically have a universal ankle bracelet. The folks who are monitoring what you do — and this could be advertisers if the advertising industry survives, or they could be governments who are trying to control what their citizens have access to, or it could be corporations who are simply trying to make a better buck off of you — they will make this bubble tighter and tighter until it's very difficult for you to get out of that bubble. And the internet, the open internet, this flowering of human knowledge and connectivity, is no longer there. We'll just be boxed into a little cage."
💥 Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, General Manager, Firefox
"Over the next couple of years, you’re going to see a convergence of AI and browsers. That's no surprise to anyone, but I think what's a little tricky here is those best positioned to win are the same big tech players that we all know today. We’'re going to start getting into a world in which – if they're controlling recommendations, search access, and information —that's a pretty big concentration of power. And so I think we're going to be navigating these ups and downs of AI for quite a few years. And that terrifies me a bit. We [at Firefox/Mozilla] love competition. We obviously love open source, So it's going to be a journey."
💥 Alissa Starzak, Deputy Chief Legal Officer and Global Head of Public Policy, Cloudflare
"I'm a lawyer and lawyers tend to be pessimists, but I feel like we have to end on an optimistic note. I think that we will come up with solutions for a lot of things. I think we will come up with a new solution to make sure that there is a future for journalism that doesn't necessarily involve direct advertising. I think that we will come up with a future that enables some version of privacy. There is opportunity in all of those areas. Businesses look for places where there is opportunity, and if we can make that opportunity positive and a future that we want, businesses will see that and they will move to those areas. So that’s the optimistic note I want to end on."
