The future of the internet is up for debate

0:00Welcome to Tech Life on the BBC World Service, the programme about technology and the role it plays in all our lives. I'm Graeme Fraser. This week, we're looking at the internet, the way it's been run for the last few decades, and the discussions going on right now about how it should operate in the future. There's a lot at stake. Also this week, and staying with the internet theme, what next for Wikipedia? I interview Jimmy Wales, its co-founder. One of my fun things I like to do is go down our list of languages until I find one that I've not heard of, which there are fewer and fewer now because I've been doing that for years.

0:35And if you're looking for some good news this week, we have the story of the award-winning teenager from America who's invented a device to monitor toxic air particles in her local area.

1:05We start today by looking at the future of the internet. According to United Nations Research, it is estimated that 5.5 billion people, or 68 % of the world's population, used the internet last year. You might even be listening to TechLife by streaming us over an internet connection right now. Well, two of the technical institutions that help keep it functioning have teamed up to warn that what holds the internet together today, what keeps it running smoothly, is at risk. and it might not be the same in the future. One of the institutions is the Internet Society. The other is the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN for short.

1:49ICANN coordinates domain names and the addresses that let us connect to each other over the internet. Curtis Lingvist is the president and CEO of ICANN and I asked him to explain how the internet is held together and run at the moment. So it's set up by a number of shared values, if you want to a standard. So it's the technical standards that are underpinning all these technical protocols that are developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force or the ITF, which is a bottom-up process. Anyone can go to the ITF with any proposal, have it debated, and if it passes the process, it eventually becomes a standard.

2:27And very much the same is done within ICANN, where we set the policies for these top-level domains or anything around those top-level domains. And so obligations, requirements are all debated through what's called a multi-stakeholder process. That is that governments, end users, commercial interests, ISPs, intellectual property rights holders, businesses, all come together on essentially equal terms and discuss these policies and define how this goes forward. And really, this shared principles that is the outcome of this process that we call the multi-stakeholder process is really the glue, really the shared understanding that builds the internet.

3:09And also that this entire model is very decentralised. There is no central authority that controls the internet. It's this shared values, shared principles of governance that really is what holds the internet together. Now you jointly published a report recently reviewing the last 20 years of the internet how it's remained open and operational in that time Now in that report it warns that the way that the internet is run is now under strain What is causing that strain? So 20 years ago, or actually slightly longer than that the UN initiated a process called the World Summit for Information Society And this was really a process that looked to see what principles should govern the Internet.

3:53And 20 years ago, there was a debate whether the UN should be governed by states sitting in closed rooms inside the UN, and they would make the rules for you and me and how the Internet would work, or whether it should continue as it was, this permissionless innovation, the bottom-up decision-making. and in that that culminated in a summit in Tunisia in 2005 where all countries together produced something called the Tunis Agenda which outlines how the internet is governed to this day and it then said that this would be reviewed every 10 years so it was reviewed 10 years ago and there is another review coming up at the end of this year and with all these reviews there will be a lot of countries, organizations like ourselves that will advocate the continuation because it has been a phenomenal 20 years of the internet.

4:45But there are those who believe another model is the right way. So coming back to a more state-controlled, state-oversight view of the internet and that debate is going to play out. And come December, there might be, there's a risk if that world prevails that we'll have a very, very different internet than we have today. And who are those states and governments that you mention? Historically, two very vocal nations have been Russia and Iran, who believes that there should be far more government oversight over the Internet. Iran has spoken out recently that they believe that the Internet should be controlled by governments in what's called a multilateral fashion in diplomacy speak.

5:30So that is the way that the UN works and how we work in the UN. we and others believe that we shouldn't have that model that the current model should prevail and has been phenomenally successful which is the report you mentioned we highlight all the achievements over the past 20 years in this model So if these countries who want to be running the internet in their own way rather than the way it's been run until now would we notice any changes? Would anything get worse? The very obvious risk is that we would see more government control over everything from reach, who have access to the internet, what applications, what content, what technologies are allowed to be used.

6:13And that would lead to what we tend to call a fragmented internet. That is that the internet I see or have access to might be different than the internet that you see and have access to. And that would really hamper the value and the innovation and the growth on the internet if we didn't have this ubiquitous, seamless global network where we could all communicate and build value together. And of course, there's many grades of how bad that could be to a completely government-controlled internet where each nation-state had its own internet would, of course, be phenomenally disruptive. And then there are grades goals over to somewhere today where there is limit of access or traceability where maybe individual freedoms or individual identities would be known.

6:58Of course, there's lots of examples of countries you've tried to control the internet in the past, in China, for instance. So is what you're saying, the worst case scenario, is that this will just become far more widespread, that governments all over the world will be trying to control the internet in their own ways? Absolutely, that is a risk. It's a risk at all the times, and it's something we always need to defend against. But if this becomes, let's say, a worst case scenario, a UN process would end in a binding resolution that's very unlikely, but it could do that, where then all the world's nations would have to adhere to the standards and the policies that are set by the UN.

7:40So if that required, for example, identity verification before you could access the Internet, you would have to implement that in every country in the world. You would have to be identified before you get access to the Internet. That could be an alternative world if we can't defend, prevail the Internet we have today. Within internet organisations like yours, is there a debate going on about this issue? There is, absolutely. And we've just returned from what's called the Internet Governance Forum in Norway. It's a UN organised conference where a lot of states, actors, businesses, end users come together and debate these issues.

8:13And ICANN, as well as many other organisations like the Internet Society, we are very active in highlighting this tremendous success that the internet really is and why it has become such a phenomenal success and why we really need to make sure we defend the principles and the underlying structures that we have today to govern the internet. So is this a real critical time for the future of the internet right now? It is, absolutely. The coming months until the UN resolution is adopted in December is critical. We have everyone is invited to provide feedback, so not just member states, but everyone is invited to provide feedback June, July into the process.

8:50and after that it will go into member state negotiation and then we will all be limited to providing feedback to states. Of course, businesses and other organisations will continue to engage with governments around the world to explain the value and how crucial this point really is to preserve the internet as we know it. So that will continue, but this is a very crucial point in time for the internet. That's Curtis Lingvist, the President and CEO of ICANN, talking to me about his concerns for the future of the internet.

9:32You're listening to Tech Life on the BBC World Service with me, Graham Fraser. Let me say hello to Philip Nance, who emailed us to say he listens to Tech Life from Sydney in Australia. G'day, Philip. Glad to have you tuning in, and sorry for that impression. This week, we've received a voice memo on WhatsApp from a listener about the one item of tech he simply can't do without, a portable compact disc player. Hello, I'm Sonny Taylor and I live in the UK. I've recently started collecting Sony Discmans and the one piece in my collection that I couldn't live without is the Sony D50 Mark II from 1986.

10:10The first to be branded as a Discman, the sound quality is superb and it looks beautiful. It's made me stop streaming music and rediscover the joy of listening to CDs again. Thanks, Sunny, for letting us know about the CD tech you can't do without. Well, perhaps there are more Tech Live listeners out there who collect fascinating favourite bits of old tech. Maybe you'd like to tell us about your vintage tech collection. We want to hear from you. I'll mention our contact details in a moment. But first, here's Tech Live's Chris Fallons to ask for your help for a future edition of the programme. Hi, Graham.

10:45Well, since you've just been talking about old tech, I'm going to zoom forward into the future of computing and talk about quantum computing. This is computing that works in an entirely different way to the computers we have at the moment and can solve potentially problems that current computers just can't solve, no matter how big or fast or powerful they get. But it's absolutely mind boggling in terms of how it works. I mean, this is really cutting-edge science, and it's very difficult to understand. So what we thought we'd do is get some experts in and answer the listeners' questions, everything they wanted to know but were afraid to ask about quantum computing.

11:26So if there's a question about quantum computing you'd really like to know the answer to, do get in touch with us, and we'll put those to experts in a future edition of Tech Life. Thanks, Chris. so if you want to get in contact with us you can by our email address techlife at bbc.co.uk or send us a WhatsApp or voice note the number plus 44 330 1230 320 I'll repeat these details at the end of the programme.

12:01Now, Jimmy Wales is one of the biggest names in the world of tech. He's the co-founder of Wikipedia the free encyclopedia that's one of the most popular websites in the world. I met up with Jimmy at a tech industry event in London recently to find out what was in his entry. We found a quietish room in the corner of a conference hall and we spoke about many things, including how AI is affecting Wikipedia and the challenges the website faces with regulators. I started off by asking him about one of the priorities for Wikipedia at the moment, its continual expansion into different languages. So we're in over 300 languages.

12:40So one of my fun things I like to do is go down our list of languages until I find one that I've not heard of, which there are fewer and fewer now because I've been doing that for years. And, you know, the challenges in a lot of the smaller languages have traditionally been about access to the Internet. So a lot of the sub-Saharan African languages, not many people have access to the Internet. that the sources that people need aren't necessarily in their language. And what has happened in the last few years is the machine translation has gotten to be pretty good. It's not good enough, but it's good enough for our community to use.

13:20And so we're finding that smaller number of volunteers in, let's say, Swahili Wikipedia can actually get more work done because they can more easily read sources, They can more easily translate articles from other languages, although we discourage wholesale translation. That generally isn't a good idea. Our belief is there should always be a human in the loop. The vision of Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet in their own language. So we're very passionate about that mission. And the world's free encyclopedia, how is that being affected by AI? Well, so far we haven't seen any drop in traffic, so that's, you know, good.

14:05And, you know, because our community is quite rigorous about sourcing, really want everything to have a good source and reliable sourcing, and we want to fight very hard against what people are calling AI slop, so some text that seems plausible but actually contains hallucinations and things like that. In general, we don't see a world in the near future when AI can just write Wikipedia entries because the hallucination problem is actually quite hard to solve. But, you know, it's an interesting and amazing technology, so there will be ways that it can support our work. So there will always be humans at the heart of Wikipedia.

14:47Yeah, definitely. Mainly because the interesting thing about us is we're a community of geeks who like writing an encyclopedia. And we're happy people like it, but actually we write it because we like to write it. And so we'll still exist. Now, where does that put the Wikipedia Foundation and the nonprofit in the global scheme of things? One of the issues that we do have is that the AIs, for the same reason they have this hallucination problem, they're also very, very bad at telling you where they learned something. and so one of the things, you know, our free license does require attribution if you sort of take our content and use it, but also it's just like the proper ethical thing to do.

15:28Like, you know, we put footnotes to say where we got the information from and AI typically doesn't do that and we think that is a problem. Policymakers around the world, regulations, this is something that Wikipedia is looking at. What are the big things on the to-do list there? One of the things that we see again and again around the world is sort of well-meaning regulations that are meant to be about online safety. So things about abuse and stalking and child grooming and things like that. if regulators don't understand how Wikipedia works, they can put sort of onerous regulatory requirements on us as if we were Twitter, sorry, X, Facebook, or something like that.

16:14But our community is very different, and the way we operate is very different, even though we are, in a very broad sense, consumer-generated content. And so if, for example, some regulation would require the Wikimedia Foundation to suddenly take on the role of doing all the moderation, which is currently handled by our volunteer community and people who are elected administrators and things like that, suddenly if we have legal liability around that, wow, we just don't know how to deal with that. That completely breaks the model of Wikipedia. And so we do get pressure from various places. We're blocked in China.

16:50We were blocked in Turkey for about three years, and we fought and won in the Supreme Court in Turkey. I'm proud of that. And so it's like those kinds of things all around the world. There's always something new. Just finally for me, Jimmy, what's next? What's next, the big things on the horizon for Wikipedia? I mean, I think by and large things are going to be as you expect. So we're not going to transform Wikipedia into TikTok or anything like that. We're very happy with how Wikipedia is. I think in terms of things that you probably won't notice on the website, not directly would be some of the things, you know, using AI tools to support the community.

17:32You know, I've been playing around personally with a tool that takes a short entry in Wikipedia and you feed in the Wikipedia entry and if it's got five sources, five sources, and you say, oh, is there anything in these sources that should be in the entry but isn't? And anything that is in the entry that's not supported by the sources. And it's actually interesting. It's not perfect, but it typically gives decent advice. And so turning that into more of a tool that people find worth using, because oftentimes a Wikipedia will come and they're like, oh, I found this short article. I'd like to improve it.

18:06I don't know where to start. And so just saying, oh, well, here's some ideas of some things that you might want to look at, that sounds useful. And so that kind of thing, probably most people won't notice it because you're just reading Wikipedia. what you will notice is, oh, wow, I wouldn't have thought there would have been a nice article about the mayor of Prague in 1745. But there is, and it's amazing. And how did they do that? Maybe AI will help us with that sort of thing. But not write entries itself. It's not very good at that. And that's why the large group of volunteers that Wikipedia has will always be a heart of the encyclopedia.

18:43Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And I think it's become more important than ever. You know, if you ask about my concerns, and my concerns about Wikipedia and AI slop and so forth aren't so much direct but indirect. You know, if we start to see plausible-looking websites that contain massive errors because they're relying on, you know, I always get a little nervous when I see any major journalistic organization saying, oh, we're going to start using AI. It's like, okay, but be very careful. And I understand that a lot of the scientific journals are really facing a huge plague of AI-generated paper submissions.

19:21That's a little scary. And I don't know, I mean, I'm not an expert in that area, but you better be careful about that. Because if we've got invalid, completely made-up sort of results in science, that really will be damaging to progress. That's Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, who spoke with me in London.

19:50Now I don't know about you, but there are times when switching on the news can feel, well, a bit gloomy at times. We all need some good news. So let me tell you about 16-year-old Sia Podar from Arizona in the United States. She is helping to solve a problem in her part of the world by inventing a device which detects toxic dust in the air. It's important because in the southwest of the US, silica and uranium dust particles from abandoned mines are a public health challenge. Sia's been given the Regeneron Young Scientist Award for her work, which comes with a$75 ,000 cash prize. And she's been telling me how she got the idea for her device.

20:32So I've lived in Arizona my whole life. We have a history of mining. We're a very big mining community. And so there's a lot of pockets of indigenous communities and mine towns that are exposed to very high levels of silica and uranium. I grew up living around these mines, like about in between. And I've always been mindful of environmental pollutants, environmental monitoring. So that was inspiration for kind of creating a device that specifically targeted these communities. So tell me, what is the problem that you're trying to solve? Yeah. So silica and uranium exposure are incredibly prevalent if you live near uranium mines.

21:12And that level of exposure can trigger a disease known as Sojourn syndrome, which causes a complete dysfunction of the immune system and your organs can critically fail. Now, the scariest part about Sojourn syndrome is that it takes six years on average to diagnose and 50 % of patients go undiagnosed entirely, especially those in these rural communities and mine towns. And so I wanted to create a diagnostic tool that specifically helped those underserved communities. And why is this toxic dust, why is it a particular problem where you are in Arizona? Yeah, so because of uranium mines, the mining process, it picks up a lot of dust into the air and then settles onto the surface.

21:58but we have a lot of death storms, wind storms, things like that that pick it back up. And in fact, based on EPA recommendations, a lot of communities in Arizona have air pollutant exposure levels that are higher than the safe level. So tell me about this device that you've invented. What does it look like and what does it do? So it is a thin film that is tinted blue for silica detection and red for uranium detection. and using a lot of complex chemistry, it shifts within 15 minutes to a bright yellow color. As the device shifts in color, the user can visually assess their own risk to these environmental pollutants and then reach out for health assistance at a far quicker rate.

22:41And what impact has your invention had so far? Great question. I've been able to reach out to a lot of smaller organizations in Arizona about their own environmental polluting and their own environmental monitoring. I think as a whole, the device and the project has given a lot of awareness, at least in my community, to the issue at hand. Because I get to present the device at regional, state and international areas, you get to talk to a lot of people who don't even recognize that this issue exists. How did you develop your knowledge to invent this air detector? I did all of this in my chemistry classroom.

23:16I found that in school there's a lot of basic principles that we learned through our classes that I could take on and then put into application in my project as well. So a lot of it just came from chemistry. And how did it feel to win the Regeneron Young Scientist Award? Oh my gosh, I still don't, like I still haven't fully processed that award. I've been doing science fair since fourth grade. So winning something of this magnitude was such a big deal. And I really didn't expect it when it happened. And what are you going to do with that prize money? That's a great question. So that seems to be the big question in my house.

23:54The device itself is very cost effective. It takes 93 cents to produce, but that's partially because I had to produce it myself. I had to do it in my chemistry classroom. So there was that cost restriction. But with this prize money, I want to advance the device to make it as effective as possible. and then of course I am going to college in a year or so so I'll definitely be using the rest of the money to fund my college. Now it's very impressive that you at the age of 16 are inventing this really clever device to fix this specific problem. How did you get this drive and enthusiasm and grit to get things done?

24:31I accredit it all to my incredible teachers and then of course my family. I've been very gifted to have good science role models my entire life and a lot of our teachers have really strived us to look for problems. I also think living in Arizona itself, a lot of climate issues are exacerbated in our state. It's a very hot state. There's a lot of air pollution. So the issues themselves kind of face you at the front. So you are almost pushed to solve them. And you already mentioned college. So what's next for you? Are you looking at more inventions or are you going to concentrate on your education right now?

25:08What's next for you? I love inventing, I love tinkering, and I can't imagine a world where I'm not always tinkering a little bit. I think it is important to focus on my education, but I'll always have some project going on in the background. That's Sia Podar from Arizona, winner of the Regeneron Young Scientist Award, putting 40-year-old me to shame. Congratulations on your award, Sia.

25:37That's almost it for Tech Life this week Remember, you can contact us about the tech you simply can't do without or perhaps you collect tech and would like to tell us about it and we're also looking for any questions you might have about quantum computers so we can put them to an expert in a future edition Our email address is techlife at bbc.co.uk or you can WhatsApp us on plus44 330 1230 320. Please include your name and where you live. Today's Tech Life was produced by Tom Quinn, edited by Monica Soriano and presented by me, Graham Fraser.