thank you as as i was saying twelve years ago when my chairmanship of the subcommittee was rudely interrupted i think it's important for us to look at the digital future of the united states and this series of oversight hearings focused on the different segments of the telecommunications marketplace and public policy as we proceed we will have hearings on voice video data markets competition innovation localism diversity and universal service my goal is that this series of educational hearings brings to the subcommittee the information and insight we will need to make sound policy judgments in the months ahead this morning's hearing focuses upon the future of the world wide web the world wide web has become indispensable to companies large and small and regardless of whether their commercial aspirations are locally oriented are of global proportions and it's become a resource that the government depends upon and that nurtures communities both real and virtual around the planet the web has grown into a communications medium unto itself where citizens can communicate and entrepreneurs can innovate the web is evolving from its initial publishing model existence into a more interactive sophisticated medium and observers have begun to talk about web two when web three  applications and services the web is a precious commodity and today we have a chance not only to better understand its current nature but to glimpse into its future because of its importance to our national economic security to global communications free speech and to myriad applications addressing health care education and cultural civic themes i believe it is vital for us to understand what we can do as policymakers to safeguard the web special role and to foster its further growth and innovation in one nine hundred ninety nine time magazine published a list of the one hundred greatest people of the twentieth century in the category of most influential scientists and thinkers the list included einstein the wright brothers dr john assault sigmund freud rachel carson and rico fermi alexander fleming but it included in that rarefied less our guests witness this morning sir timothy berners lee after all who better to inform us about how we should approach the task of understanding the world wide web and its future than its inventor we are delighted that he has agreed to be with us this morning and i think that it is a good way of kicking off this next two years of the telecommunications and internet subcommittee i would like to announce turn to recognize the ranking member of the subcommittee a man with whom i have worked for years in partnership in a bipartisan fashion seeking to frame these issues in a way that reflects the essential nonpartizan way in which technology issues should be viewed my good friend the gentleman from michigan mr upton well thank you mr chairman it is a pleasure to be here i appreciate you convening today's hearing we have had a unique and wonderful opportunity to have an in depth philosophical discussion on the future of the world wide web and i would just note as you lament year to twelve years  minority but in never neverland perhaps it's been a pretty productive twelve years in terms of advancement and technology field probably not twelve years that we've seen ever in the history of mankind so we look forward to that continuing and certainly seriously are our very good relationship on on a whole host of issues there's no question that the web with great thanks to mr berners lee has indeed transformed our daily lives technologies that were not even dreamed of twelve several years ago are now standard and who knows what the future will hold and i look forward to that perspective as we listen to your testimony engage in questions i also look forward to having candidates question on how we can better protect our citizens what steps can policymakers in industry folks take to further protect our identities what can be done to stifle the explosion of child internet sex predators while the we revolutionized the everyday world it has also opened up a new world of criminals abound from petty thieves to pedophiles a broad range of criminals now have the ability to probably internet in a virtual cloak of anonymity and i mini and with the continuing abundance of cyber criminals we must ensure that what worldwide web continues to stand for exactly that not the wild wild west we also must ensure that we as we continue to foster an environment of economic growth and technological advancement and we need to ask the question who knows what tomorrow's world will bring but i'm hopeful that this morning's discussion might be able to shed a little light on what the future might hold i appreciate you coming all this way to share your your thoughts ubiquitous part of our lives that i think we take it for granted its role in virtually all aspects of our economy our politics our entertainment is incontrovertibly all and it continues to  grow one of the obvious influences the web has had is in the political spectrum and it's had a tremendous impact on the american political system during the last presidential action political parties candidates and independent groups utilize the internet to organize and to raise money in new and innovative ways and these activities were only accelerated in the campaign last year and it's undeniable that a video posted on you tube is responsible for the democratic majority in the united states senate so it's had a huge impact the internet has also completely changed the manner in which political campaigns and politics in general are covered in the mainstream media the impact of blogs and independent websites on traditional news organizations is perhaps the most important phenomenon of the twenty first century culture so far this nearly limitless diversity of content and views is a revolutionary change in public discourse it really is the voices of many speaking to many it's impossible to overestimate the powerful dynamic that technology in the internet will have been promoting democracy in our own society and our institutions and ultimately the world no longer will an individual  be limited by geography wealth or disability to have access to this global repository of literature science information and entertainment i'm concerned that the diversity of voices on the internet is under threat and that the power to control access to information and content is becoming increasingly concentrated in a handful of large media and telecommunications companies it's this issue the development of gatekeepers to content and information on the internet that really is at the heart of an issue that's been intensely debated in this subcommittee and the last congress called net neutrality i think the future of the world wide web is in large part dependent on how we resolve this issue and i think it's incumbent on congress to ensure that the voices of the many can continue to speak to the many whether or not they have s pleased that your chairmanship was rudely interrupted twelve years ago that we are always in a personal way glad to see people get ahead in the world and certainly glad to see you back in the chair that you think you should be and all the time where we were looking forward to that i'm going to put my statement in the record let me simply say this since we have a friend from over the ocean from that we believe that every person makes a difference and it is very rare that we see one of those people before us that has made such a difference as you have sir truly the world is a different  better place much better place because of your is your story says your noodling when you were at cern my step children and my children and even my grandchildren now are old enough to use the internet and do things in go places and get information that i could have only imagined when i was growing up you know you're go get to see one of these odd things called a congressional subcommittee hearing and maybe you can think about that and noodle a bit and tell us how to improve this very archaic and imprecise inefficient mechanism of democracy that we do salute to you truly have made a difference it is an honor to be in the same room with you and i look forward to hearing your thoughts about the issue before us today nobody recognized the gentleman the chairman of the full committee the gentleman from michigan is the dingell mr chairman first of all thank you for holding this hearing i commend you this is an important matter and i want to thank the members of the committee for their interest in this matter i thank you for bringing before us sir timothy berners lee who is the man who invented the world wide web and who has made what most people call the internet not only permeation pervasive but also as it is important as it is today i've seen my share of disruptive technologies over the years indeed i am someone who vividly recalls the days when digital meant you to deliver a message with the digits of your hand nowadays our thumbs have the have to type the tiniest keys on a blackberry or some similar device on these disruptive technologies the power of world wide web to revolutionize our society is like no other america is the birthplace of the internet and yet there are serious concerns that our ranking in the global information economy is less than it should be consumers in other countries enjoy broadband connections that are faster cheaper and offered by more providers our committee intends to do its part in a national broadband strategy deserving of this great nation and again i want to commend you for your leadership in this matter and i want you know that this matter in this subcommittee will be very very important indeed we will begin by hearing sir berners lee's evaluation of where the web stands today and where it will be headed in the future i am particularly interested in answers to these questions first what are the key lessons to be learned from the popularity and growth of world wide web what principles can be gleaned from your experience second how do you see the web of the future evolving what steps must be taken to ensure that the web continues to meet the desires and needs of future generations i understand that the world wide web consortium is developing what is called the semantic web or the next generation of data integration on the web and you have a mobile web initiative to make access for mobile and convenient as it is from desktop computers around the world that we are now compelled to stare at i think unfortunately for hours on end third we would just the question of we ensure that the digital future of the internet is a robust one enjoyed by all people i support the consortium's goals of a true world wide web whose benefits are available to all people regardless of language culture location network infrastructure physical or mental ability provided all americans access to the best telecommunications network and services has been a driving principle of the telecommunications policy since an act meant of the telecommunications act in one thousand nine hundred four well maine remain show and i know that you mr chairman this committee and the subcommittee will be working very hard on that matter to see to it that that those thoughts are realized once again i thank you mr chairman for having this hearing we're honored to have this distinguished witness before us today and i look forward to his testimony and i thank you again i thank the gentleman gentleman from oregon with the wall  and the web in particular is the pet cause or or scapegoat of practically everyone who comes before our subcommittee these days i think it's a great idea to have our committee go to the father of the web and hear what he has to say before we get too much deeper into these issues i believe that the internet has the potential to give everyone an equal platform to report about and upon on the goings on around them and open and free internet could be considered the first truly accessible tool to make the spirit of the first amendment come alive for everyone in the country but without an internet available to all that guarantees fast speech to anyone's content that potential is just a promise the reality of the internet today for most americans is not really comparable to its potential the reality that the f c c considers two hundred kilobits as broadband speeds so inadequate that even video optimized for slower connections like that provided by  youtube requires five hundred kilobits one hundred fifty percent faster than two hundred kilobits to run in real time the reality is that broadband isn't available even at those low speeds to tens of millions of americans the web is a valuable perhaps essential tool for expanding and enriching public debate mark dri it has already greatly enhanced the nation's discourse on public affairs but until it is as pervasive as broadcast media and newspapers and until new website truly compete with those traditional media outlets and the websites they control the webs existence should not be used to justify media consolidation nor should it be held up as the gold standard of openness by the same people who want to restrict information and act as gatekeepers i'm interested in what sir bernard lee has to say about these issues but i also appreciate hearing the view on the internet and web policy matters from th thirty thousand feet up a broader view of what we might otherwise drill down to in the subcommittee mr chairman i thank you for holding this hearing today and i yield back the balance of my time thank the gentleman gentleman from florida mr stearns mr chairman thank you very much  delighted to be here when you read the time magazine article about him and you realize not only was he a great discover of the of this new technology but he was almost al is desire because he was in the person that ran out and try to make a lot of money and he worked for a nonprofit organization was behind the scenes and in many ways represents this philanthropic way that he wanted to help the world and he's did so indeed according to a december two thousand and six survey by the pew internet and american life project my colleague seventy percent of american adults use the internet that currently represents  just under one hundred fifty million people of those ninety one percent send or read e mail eighty percent look for health or medical information seventy one percent using the internet to buy a product sixty seven percent went online to get news and now almost forty five percent use it for online banking when you look at the statistics back from the march two thousand from the same organization you see how far we've come and i guess the question all of us want to ask him what does he see for the future what you see for the future in health care how could the internet help us there education scientific research public safety protection of children is probably a host of new areas that he could provide force like in my state there's online health records take take the mayo clinic in jacksonville florida thanks to online health records my constituents in florida can see any of the three hundred ten physicians and benefit from a mail wide electronic record all providers all have access to the same comprehensive and current medical history lab results pharmacy records and radiology images errors and wasteful duplications are avoided the quality obviously is enhanced now this is just one example of how the future of the internet will improve our lives so it's clear today that this individual can give us remarkable insight from his perspective of what we can do healthcare education in the as i mentioned others i want to thank you mr chairman for holding processors performed at less than one thousandth of the speed they do today our way this was a twinkle in his mother's eye or a very little boy and the information technology society of the twenty first century was not even the subject of scientists wildest speculations we've come an amazingly long way but the information technology revolution is not over fifty years from now our world in our society will likely look radically different we've been bad predictors of the tech not of technological change in eight hundred ninety nine charles dools it commissioner of the u s patent office reportedly said everything that can be invented has been invented how wrong he was and i have no doubt that today in a classroom somewhere in a america a young female i t genius is discovering the secrets of the computers that will lead to inconceivable inventions our challenges policymakers is to try  to assure that the innovation that now defines the american economy is available to as many people as possible worldwide something that many of the speakers earlier this morning have addressed but also that it improves lives and helps us solve the world's most intractable problems one big problem to be solved yet to be solved is the need for public safety and intelligence agencies to benefit from the information technology advances we enjoy as private citizens the nine eleven commission reported that before the world trade center and pentagon attacks the f b i s outdated and outmoded computer system prevented agents from finding and communicating information about the hijackers today first responders do not have voice and data communication systems to coordinate emergency responses these are grave technological liabilities unfitting of our information culture and something that that this subcommittee must help resolve but there's also a flip side to this not only do we need to get information to those who would keep us safe but we need to think about how to prevent  information from getting to people who are radicalized by it and who learn to make bombs and become terrorists from surfing the web so it's a very very tough problem one this committee will have to think about and no witness so far as i know is more imaginative and more qualified to give us a basis for proceeding than the witness before us today so i look forward to the testimony and again mr chairman very proud to serve  i come from an area in houston and in its and under served area and so my interest has always been more expansion of the world wide web including the rate program and in limiting the risk of problems on the internet like spam identity theft and fraud but i have to admit most of my staffers in my office cannot imagine ten or fifteen years ago doing what we do today without the internet in the research capabilities that we have congressional research service at the time said going to the library to pick up a book now it's all right at the desk and it's amazing so but like my colleague from california i know somebody much younger than you and i are probably developing something new will be surprised at ten or fifteen new years now so welcome and i'm glad you're here thank gentleman from indiana mr hill thank you mr chairman i feel like back in high school again in my german class for the first day this is i'm a new member of the committee and i'm anxious to learn all the intricacies of telecommunications in  particular the world wide web and mr chairman i echo the remarks that have already been afforded to you it's a privilege and a pleasure for me to be on this committee and use the subcommittee chairman mr chairman i appreciate you scheduling this hearing and sir berners lee i appreciate you taking the time to appear before us today technology has changed all of our lives in some ways it has made it easier to stay in touch through cell phones wireless calendars and e mail in other ways technology has made more difficult through cell phones wireless calendars and e mail and sir berners lee you're to blame for all of it conducting research being able to test drive music and most importantly stay in touch with loved ones are all examples of how our allies have improved  technology however one of the most important aspects of technology is not what is available but who has access to the latest innovations the only way the world wide web and all of the innovations that have stemmed from its invention has been able to succeed is through consumer access and use it is important to remember that we have to concentrate on serving all consumers including those in rural america and i live in rural america in southern indiana with all these wonderful services thank you mr chairman for holding this hearing which i know is only the first in a comprehensive series of hearings that will fully investigate these issues and you'll back remember my time i thank the gentleman i don't see any other members at this time so we'll turn to our witness i sorta met the berners lee who coined the term world wide web wrote the first world wide web server authored the first version of the and in two thousand and four he was made a knight commander of the order of the british empire by queen elizabeth the second but in fact he has been a night for the world in providing this incredible ability to communicate  it's an honor for us to have you with us today please when you feel comfortable begin your testimony will do what i can to answer some of these questions at least to set the groundwork to put before us what the things are i feel most important about the web on which we should base its future so i'm here as an engineer and your nearest define the protocols by which computers talk to each other you're here as legislators legislators can define laws protocols constraints on the way human beings communicate the web is not just a engineering construction the web is really a web of people when something happens on the web like something new takes off what happens is a very intricate connection between the new piece of new technology like blogs software and a whole social phenomenon interacting people so really the web as a whole is humanity connected by as connected by the internet and so it is very important that the constraints on the imposed by the technology in the constraints imposed by those play ssion work together harmoniously to provide the very best we can possibly do so that's that spirit that i come here i must say that although i have various hats  although i did invent the web i had the benefit of doing that and building on the benefit of the internet which had been invented some twenty years earlier and in fact the email when you get an email back you have other people to blame for that so what i was going to do that explain what i think is most important explain if you like what's essential about the web which makes it work which gives it the properties which allow always exciting things to happen and which therefore are those things which we should take take away and make sure that we preserve as we develop the web so then i'll go into a few specific directions in which i hope that the web will progress i some basic by going back to some of the basic principles upon which we must depend as we go on and create new things like the web and new things built on top of the web so what is essential about the web i built the web i personally out of it wasn't it wasn't my job to build the web i had another job to do but i needed the web i was working in a very large european physics lab cern there were lots of systems which contained information documentation systems they were all different you had to go to different computers you had to use different software programs and to get a different piece of information often you had to talk to different experts the whole thing was very frustrating wouldn't it be nice if all that piece of information were in the same system now it's seen a lot of people make that decide that and build the big system to handle systems and the system and all these attempts certainly the ones i wa were failures they failed to include everybody and they failed to include everybody because they insisted on something they insist sometimes that you would use a particular computer sometimes you would use a particular set of software by from all over the world as focal kinds of languages so it was clear to me first of all that in fact we could keep all these systems working but surely we could invent some imaginary system where if you like is an imaginary program imagining that all these things are in one program but in fact we're keeping them in all the different ones if you like the web is a white sheet that we're holding up and all these different systems are projected onto it what is clear was that she had to be perfectly white not have any particular structure the web itself could not insist that people organize their data in a particular fashion in a tree or in a table it couldn't insist that they used a particular technology it had to work with people using any tool for computer systems print the most important principle of the web is this unit personality the universe ality independence of hardware and software independence of what culture somebody comes from as well as what language they keep and one of the nice things that's come out of the technologies really where people with disabilities have more power than any other technology because information can be presented in lots of different ways depending on the abilities of the person who's perceiving it so there's a lot of excitement there about that dimension of universality so it's a universal space the important thing is that anything should be able to link to anything compared to a lot of transportation systems mail systems telephone systems where you can you can touch on across the world these all these things make the world a smaller place but the hypertext link the thing that you click on that takes you from one document to another has this very interesting property every document every piece of information so that allows me to strike to point out a relationship between two things where no previous relationship has been anticipated that's a really important thing to happen when we're solving all problems to spot those relationships and to be able to represent things those relationships and  think came connect to anything anybody can publish a web page is very very cheap to do so when they do so they are obviously bound by the lors of the jurisdiction in which they live but they should not be bound by the technology the technology should not force them to write in a particular style to write with a particular quality in a particular language and so on so the world wide web is universal is it is unable or it is not there to constrain the fact that the standards open standards so much is based the standards which dictate how computers talk to each other when you click on a link and your computer goes off to get a piece of information from a web server somewhere those standards which depict the person who wrote those programs originally read to determine how the computers talk to each other are royalty free that has been very important it was a give and at the same time of course changes acceptable use allowed commercial use of the net we've seen from the amount of spam that you probably get in your own mailboxes there are huge commercial incentives out there when there are those huge commercial incentives with a lot of money around  temptation to just for people to say let us put this in let's see if we can get some money out of the infrastructure now the web took off in all its glory with all the diversity of things out there which have happened because developing it in their garage dropped the whole system like cops say though because they didn't want to work for the university of minnesota for free in their weekends people working for large companies were told by their lawyers not to read a single part of the code the specs don't go near it and that point people came to me and said what's the story with the web so i managed to get a declaration by cern that the cern would not ask royalties for the technology and all the companies and individuals that come together in the world wide web consortium through the world over convergence patent policy agree progressively agree to put their cards on the table and to agree that when we produce the standard nobody will be charging royalties for it that is very important basis is something that is important because we make the world the world wide web it is not important for itself it is important for what is built on top of that and that brings me to another important very important principle that is the separation of the layers when i design the world wide web i wrote two programs i wrote a program to be the browser and the program to be the server and i distributed them over the internet now these programs wherever somebody installed them would just talk to each other across the internet the internet itself is a communication medium which allows two programs to talk to each other it doesn't require anything of what those programs are about or trying to do it is as universal itself as possible so the internet service is sometimes represented as an hourglass above the neck of the hour glass or all the things which use the facility of communication which is provided by the internet one of those is the worldwide web another is e mail and underneath are all kinds of ways in which technologies are supporting the transfer of information and these connected a very simple interface just a stream of ones and zeroes which is to be can that is the service which is provided so i've had the luxury of developing the world wide web really without having to worry very much about whether how how those bits offend and during the time that this has happened i've gone from using a three hundred board connection on the  foundation technology is something which tries to be very clean very general purpose it tries to get out of the way and allow other people because what's the most important thing about the future of the web what's the most important application that's going to be developed on the web is something which is being developed by somebody yes quite likely some woman who is dreaming about some frustrated with something somebody  somewhere and they will develop this thing as offensive web sites as a new protocol and they will develop it using the web infrastructure and they won't have to come to me to ask me whether we can start will work consortium up in a motor change the w architecture they'll just be able to use it and we will use the internet artic architecture and all these things will evolve independently so the separation of layers really has been a key to the growth of this growth would not have happened if one l is data integration documents like a typical computer you can think of some of them as data and some of them as documents the documents the messages you can put on the web and people can read the data the spreadsheets the calendars and so on you can see perhaps documents representing them on the web but you can't gather the data in such a way that you can put it into a spreadsheet you can't pull out all the information about the weather and some of the goals that we have include for example all the applications on my desktop should be able i should be able to connect things together i should be either take my photographs and drop them on to my calendar and see where in time they happened and do the same thing with my bank statements but very importantly in the enterprise application in the enterprise tend to be stovepipes at the moment and that's a great impediment to the management of an enterprise that you don't have integration between these different applications that's but more globally place cations like disaster management i think would very much be enabled by this web of data the thing that we call very much driven by huge amounts of very complex data and we have of course very dire needs to find out things like drugs for cancer drugs for aids there's a huge amount of information some of it makes some of it is prote s some of it is clinical trials all these at the moment are stovepipes to be functional as a human race and solving these problems we need semantic web technology to allow all these things to be connected together so web on these little devices but we have the mobile web initiative insertion which is trying to make that much easier it is trying to show there are ways of getting the same information in a way that can be accessed with a huge screen or with screens which can be used for browsing the web so the hope is that this will increase the penetration of web access for things like healthcare for example in poor areas and also in the developing world if my phone can communicate with a display that i'm next to as i walk into my phone hotel room then it should i will i will be able to continue doing what i was doing on the phone except with this very large display that is  ubiquitous web and it points to a time when really what we're doing our address book is a is a virtual thing something which is out there on the web and we use different devices to see it but it isn't something which we think is connected to physical device anymore just as the information is now in this information in the space then the web well be a space which contains the things which we now associate with physical devices so only case that i should stop not at all we we live by the bells this is bells here in the congress and those bells with your ringing right now are telling us that there is a roll call on the house floor we will have to be there by  fifteen minutes but you can continue to proceed when it rings the second time it means that there is more than one roll call on the floor which ok that will have to recess at some point well is that things happen which we didn't predict when somebody creates a new phenomenon like a blog like wikipedia they don't know absolutely that it will take off and become world wide phenomenon some of many many things don't of course we don't hear about them many websites start fizzle out and become just don't become popular some do so when people design things they design something in the small those things which is a sessile have this large effect they produce a large hopefully beneficial effect how we going to produce new web technology and make sure these are beneficial are two ways one is i think we actually have to be aware of this difference between the microscopic rules that govern people and govern computers this relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic phenomenon so we're calling it web science this awareness of the fact that the web is now a huge thing there are more web pages than people the world is a large place it contains many people the brain is a complicated thing it contains many neurons we study those as complex things and they are complex things and they do things which you couldn't imagine by looking at the individual elements them the web does things which you can imagine by just looking at the individual elements unless you study it as a web science so we're calling that web science one of the things that we do then is try to get people together across disciplines because this is not just computers people they are governed by laws that govern by psychology and incentives they're governed by economics we need a lot of there are lots of different ways in different fields which need to look at this as well as computer science and network engineering so that we call web science we're not done we're just starting that we really i think will not see a slowing down now we've succeeded in the web we'll see a continuous speeding up i'm afraid it's going to continue it's not going to get any easier to keep up what's the second way that we make sure that we do things right well we use these core values i guess just as you do creating laws you  we've seen what we've seen some of these principles for the web are those of university keeping the web universal independent of hardware independent of software independent of who happens to be your internet service provider at the moment the present instant in time independent of language independent culture independent disabilities so the universe fallacy is a very important thing we've seen the layering keeping the development of the internet the transport of bits ones and zeroes independent of things which are built on that like the web like email like now things like second life all built on top of the on top of the internet and making sure that the web in turn itself is the blank sheet the blank canvas something which does not constrain the innovation which is just around the corner which something is itching somebody thinking to do somewhere and i suppose most importantly we realize that this thing is does not belong to anybody now yep you know it's based on some ideas that i have i threw them out and they were taken up by hundreds thousands millions of people get it started in the united lee internet locksmith started met mainly with darpa funding but it spread and it's all over the world the internet and the web these two layers are now fundamental infrastructure for the global society it's very important as we develop and we make sure that they don't become controlled by any one company or for that matter by any one country members of the committee you're fine that is the most important thing i suppose i have to say i'm very anxious to hear any questions you might have and to help you in any way an understanding minute vote followed by a five minute vote we are going to come back and continue the hearing for as long as members do have questions of this great man let me recognize the gentleman from michigan right now for any questions you might have we can stay here for another five minutes or so so fr you'd like to ask some questions thank you and join the testimony and we all have our our personal experiences of how this is impact this and for the most part it's been very very positive and as we look back at it history for me so example i visit a school grade school or a school virtually every week and i can remember ten twelve years ago i'd ask how many people use the internet even among a second or third grade class in just a few kids maybe now of course every hand is up and i often follow up with another question how many of you have seen something that's probably inappropriate particularly for these youngsters and again every hand including mine goes up as well and i guess the question that i have is we have a little bit of a double edged sword and there's there's dangers and there's there's great advantages in in many many ways families being able to communicate with their sons and daughters serving overseas  new devices in terms of tracking food that's in their recipes i mean all the you know turning on ovens i mean all these different things that are quite revolutionary from where we were five or six years ago but what are some of the the things that we should be looking out as we look at the future in terms of privacy in terms of things that you might want someone not to be able to connect to in terms of pornography or other issues how do we handle some of those issues look to the future well i could that's obviously a huge topic and we could talk for hours about it but i suppose fundamentally the thing to remember is that every every powerful tool can be used for good or evil  and it can be used by people with who are doing good things and people doing bad things and the primary to first order the job of the web is to be that white slate and of course everybody who does mean illegal always have been illegal and continues to be legal in one of our the rebels is that even though we have some pretty tough laws here in this country in the u k and other places often these relocate someplace else where you don't have that you know that they're international and we don't have the same type of law committees other than the parts of the world and in fact the countries countries working together in general to solve things like such as spam for example is very important so the web consortium is international want to do the right think you'd like to use it in a report but you're not sure whether you can one of the important things that happen now happening now is meditator about whether what licensing terms are on that picture is more and more being a put into the picture itself or put into the surrounding documents and automatic tools and systems like the creative commons licenses allowing people to do the right things so before trying to create systems which prevent people from doing bad things which often is very very difficult  allowing putting systems up there which allow people to do the right thing in the large but it is very important awareness of privacy of course is very important there's a huge amount of information out there is the stuff which is kept most secret some of the things which i hope to see in the future include systems which are aware of the policies which relate to the data and the information so that as the data is moved around it can be the machines can be aware of who's who supposed to be looking at getting it and also perhaps who supposed to be using it for what purpose so  congress people say what is a typical day and of course it's a day where you cannot predict anything which is going to occur not unlike the chaotic nature of the world wide web itself let me turn and recognize the gentle lady from chairman and again i thank the witness for being here and your testimony was great to hear i wish you would have had about twenty minutes at least longer to continue on as my colleague fred upton was asking i think you closed with basically what was a definition in my mind of d r and my big question is of course property rights intellectual property on the internet and how we protect it and you even cite in your testimony steve jobs talking about d r m and the need to do away with the r m how it's a closed platform and we've seen podcasts increase but the sale of music decrease and i was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit further on this because in my mind all you've done and exchange of ideas and but when somebody has a copyrighted piece of work whether it's a song or a movie that translation into the web in the future to me is uncharted territory could you elaborate a little bit further on where you see the world going and how creators of content will be compensated in a world free of d r m will track whether or not you own this and it won't stop you but it'll let you know that if you're playing music but you shouldn't listen to it which is what you because you've been that somebody else's machine is that you got access to it it'll make it clear it'll it'll turn pink if we promote technology is for the method data for information about information putting on the licensing information putting in information about who's got rights to you go back to that steve jobs article that he points out there are a lot of issues with the fact and i think people some people haven't thought about the problem but what happens when completely of course free so if you want to know what he points out the free world is a world final piece of c d s but it's not the equivalent of having a speed limit but no enforcement of the speed limit you could put posted speed warning signs for the people and i mean it's the same thing with the r m you can always tell people the right thing to do is to not download this for free but without the enforcement mechanism they still will just like wh now so no the enforcement of speeding is probably might be a good analogy that every everybody knows what they're supposed to do under some circumstances people will push the bounds of the pit times people will stay even further within the bounds but you  is distance that the disincentive of punishment is it sufficient that's the thing i'm must say i'm inclined to try to make software that you do the right thing for us i don't know i can't we haven't tried the experiment of having something which is like the situation with c d s and vinyl records we know which is a dram free downloadable music we don't know how the public reacted we haven't seen what the software looks like we haven't seen what the user interface looks like we haven't seen  t the record company process was look likes so i think it's this is the sort of thing which needs a lot of which we know i don't have myself a firm opinion as to whether in fact we'll be able to do it completely without some form of the arm or not  but i think we should try to make a system which which avoids for example encrypting things in ways that they won't be able to be read in a few years time i agree with that cross platform problem is it is a huge problem for all of us you have an move it over to your other devices is a problem for me too but my biggest fear too is in this new business model what we're going to change is the content creator now has to become a commercial agent that in order to be paid for your song or your movie it's  your song is now i did promoting a commercial product and movies as we're saying anymore anyway are already doing that so that is my concern in the new world this is how do we prevent that from happening and steve with great respect to steve jobs  he problem he's trying to sell hardware first and foremost and not the content and i wonder if he would feel the same way about his patents being on the internet free of patent protection so that that's my huge concern and i really appreciate what you've done in your thoughts here and look forward to this beautiful future of the world wide web and i know it's going to be a great place for content providers as well as hardware device makers in the world so thank you very much for being here  legislation would be unprecedented regulation of the internet it's really taken the whole issue of neutrality and kind of twisted it into a pretzel it's a very curious to me now i mean no one knows better than you that from the inception of the internet until very recently the internet was protected under f c c nondiscrimination rules  which required telecommunications carriers to take a hands off approach to the internet so my question is you know would you describe for us how these rules impacted the evolution of the web i think that you more than touched on it in your in your opening statement and how an absence of nondiscrimination rules going forward would impact the development of the web that's my descriptions and where we need to arrive and what we don't have now in the blending of information my question is how will an automated semantic web be able to distinguish can't i can't talk about this in detail i can say that i feel that nondiscriminatory internet provision is very important for a society based on the world wide web i think that is very important i think that the communication medium is so important to society that we have to give it a special treatment we have in lots of other ways when i was a growing up the i learned to understand that interfering with her majesty's mails was extremely serious  offense why because well the males are what actually allows the country to function as the countries allow the state to function as a state and here there's a protection of the fourth state there is the protection of freedom of speech there are a lot of the because we are a society only in as much as we are human beings communicating that communication is held has always been held with a special respect and i think that's very important to the internet start to becoming a dominant dominating medium so if there were a choice if there were a possibility that maybe a sigh come from eyes of these principles would maybe deliver a world in which perhaps the markets open  still function and perhaps open democracy would still function but it wasn't absolutely clear i would always been on the side of keeping the keeping the medium to be a blank sheet of trust how do you how do you decide what information on the web to trust that it is the answer is in practice that you use other people as judges when you read a blog you read one person's blog because you got a point or from another person's blog and every morning if you log on and you have a set of blogs that you read that are set which you carefully nurture you carefully nurture your bookmarks because there are things which you which you trust and which take you to places that you trust it all links provided function is the same even though the data published by many places all the semantic web agents out there all this many are programs that help people all the semantic web programs which try to look for disasters and worrying alarm situations will be taking data some of the will be taking data only from fixed places they will only be monitoring the tsunami early warning indicators all they will only be looking at the nasdaq they will be hooked up to specific feeds others will roam around looking for data in general then they will come to tentative conclusions and then they will present those conclusions with as an appendix by the way this is where it came from so we're doing a lot of research on that and the  mit trying to make systems that are more sophisticated trying to show how could how transparent can you make a system how to what extent can you make it policy where this if you like as an extension of the solution general we found for things like pornography on the web we found that on general the solution to this sort of thing is to allow people to label things to allow people to put in  information that when you asked about something taking data from the semantic web well somebody has a child sitting at a terminal and wants to protect that child can install software which will  filter the information coming to that child will center there are all kinds of commercial systems that you have a choice of them you have a choice of different white lists and blacklists so i demonstrated that information about information is very powerful allows us to provide where we needed a on net neutrality the gentle lady has asked a question about net neutrality and i and we very much appreciate your views on the subject just so that everyone on the committee can know the people at the end of the year we're going to hear high definition videos or are you talking it give me your idea in the future what these digital displays you said there cover large display areas so maybe you might just expand on that future  displays so that all of the taxicab instead of just the top becomes a moving digital display so the question i would turn back perhaps is just supposing that when you walk into your office the walls are all capable of would you find most powerful what would you really want to be able to do how could you use that how could you tell how would the desk know what to display how would the wall know what to display how would your your phone happen to be in the middle for example of going through a rather tedious and suppose it determines that it's your desk determines that it can trust it with information and realizes that you can you're in a position you can see it and then instead of having to communicate on that little screen it then will communicate by putting up a map of the map of the flight that it's proposing some pictures of the restaurants where it's the dressing you're going to eat and other related information about your travel travel in a much larger format on the on the desk on the wall to do that for that to happen this the flight that you're booking has to break out of the phone device it has to really be in the abstract medium just as things are on the web it has to be able to  id to use it has to be all have an independent existence but lots of problems have to be solved in between because you don't want details of your phone to put details of your private condor up on the subway i mean would have to think in this case and determine whether i have devices coming to an end and what in your mind is diverse i mean like in this trio i can get the web i can get my mail i can get telephone calls i can get gains i can do all kinds of things diversity of devices beyond this is there something that you imagine beyond this in terms of diverse device well there are devices which for example which are all screen and any interaction is gestural in the future maybe with cameras you'll be able to simply gesture without even touching in the future to take data from a software program and throw it into an excel sheet things like that i mean under the macintosh g four you can take any photographs and put them on greeting cards you can put them on a calendar you can do all kinds of things is that the type of thing you're talking about am doing my taxes and i'm here and i'm looking at a bank statement i do not know why i spent a few hundred dollars at that point is this expense so now the bank statement software only provides me with the day at this time because you throw all that information together into that one application ill tell you and that's what he's talking about the future thank you thank you so much time's expired gentleman from indiana  dollars a month for his health insurance and he told me said barron you know if it goes up anymore i got to drop my coverage as i said i got those kind of comments every single day of the campaign i don't know if you you can answer this question i'm not but is there do you see any world wide web supporting applications for health care you know we're grappling with this problem in congress and we're trying to come up with solutions and you're the inventor of the world wide web is there is there some relief here that we can provide customers or tell them about that you can creatively come up with in your mind i'd like to hope so but i i think the whole health care problem i agree really important and very difficult as well i was discussing with people last weekend and so you ask whether there could be contribution from the web to this well i must say one of the suffering from a very difficult to diagnose condition he'd been given all kinds of treatments by all kinds of doctors and different drugs which it really was worse than this and he'd end up dropping out of school and becoming part of society gave his son a test personally and he cured him by changing his die within three days so that and that is a lot of people are going to the going to the web for healthcare information brings up of course the question of whether where how you know what in r four years since before the web the complexity of it is the course that involves a lot of policy very important policy as to who gets to see what information under what circumstances those  information around in a standard format which is what the semantic web provides so that anybody can potentially read it not being impeded by the fact they've got the wrong software but meanwhile if you provide everybody with if you take down the barriers from the differences of different types of software which exist currently with but with patient records so that if you have something if you're wearing something which contains your parent record and you and you have an accident in some part of the country some strange part of the country the somebody any that any empty can then pick up that information and find out your blood type and so on as you break down this barrier areas then you have to erect artificial carefully put barriers of privacy confidentiality of course and so doing that is very important work i think it's just work we have to do i think it's possible so i think it's possible to make patient care system more is to use the technology where delany's appropriate to use it for the mechanical things to do to make sure the computer can do the things which it can do and and people like doctors and nurses are doing the things that only doctors nurses can do you  know any applications that might be available to people to try to acquire some kind of health care i mean that's kind of the i understand that there's all kinds of technologies in place on the on the web that people can refer to for treatment but this whole issue of the cost of health care is becoming the problem do you see any applications that the world wide web would be able to offer to give give people some relief to cover well to cut down the cost of health care for example  remote presence and generally the remote act when a remote expert a doctor with a consultant is called and obviously it comes down the cost of the doctor doesn't have to travel it cuts down on the doctor's time if the doctor can be presented with all the information data which they legally half and about the patient and all the relevant data also from the sum of medical knowledge about similar cases giving the doctor that quickly and easily and intuitively is obviously something which is going to make briefly that we sort of do that with dogs now you plan to chip in an i s o standard at least for a den of occasion purposes and it seems to me that it wouldn't be that hard we can do that for our dogs and our pets to figure out how we could not necessarily implant a chip but certainly carry those data with us as we as we go around and yet have privacy so i mean i'm intrigued by that i want to ask you a question i know this will come across probably as weird but  do you see a potential being an mit engineer and a great thinker and visionary where you can ever move not just data but matter no that's for somebody else to see i don't know how to do that  consortium is working on the mobile web getting making the web so that it can work on mobile devices and as part of that hopefully cheaper devices which can be used in developing countries and poor bounds of the web services technology for example which allows and a price enterprise distributed systems to be built and companies to communicate with each other and export services information services  active in lots of different sorts of areas some in some cases really leading having a vision seeing that it could be different and pushing it and then leading putting getting the standards out there put out there by a few other people who see a vision and get the twinkle in their and they're prepared to invest upfront because they realize what it could be like if everybody when everybody does it other times there's a market need for  something like the privacy technology which allows us to allow people to look at to set their browser up to test the privacy policy of a web site just because if you like hygiene issues because they just  give them the best access to all this what is the equivalent of a spreadsheet or whatever it is that you need to to browse through all this data and analyze it and connect things which you never take to before and as i mentioned before the policia where web building systems which are where of the policy around data and act responsibly building buildings software which is responsible software which allows people to be responsible that leads to an issue we've dealt with a lot  in this subcommittee and in the full committee things like spyware and pop up ads and those sorts of things and how as a consumer i can have more control over what comes into my computer and it seems like every time we build a firewall or do something to get  out that the smarter people figure out how to get around whatever was created to stop it if you look at those issues as well or those are sort of left to the private sector to figure out well i have to have to admit the world over consortium felt for a long be so anonymous but the e mail system was put together it was designed originally for an environment where everybody were friends talking to each other very academic environment in which messages were forged from one machine to another for the public good without worrying really about who's going to pay for it because  that what do you see as the top one or two policy issues that we should address and what are the top one or two threats to the worldwide web that we should be aware of what should we be thinking about especially long term both in the states and in europe opinions are changing about how when it's appropriate to take patents and i think we're moving to a situation where large companies which you think of as being the big companies which used to just make those standards have to be royalty free and that that understanding is necessary to for the to protect all the new markets the huge new markets which come in the future so i think that subcommittee with you and with ranking member upton the other distinguished members here can thank you for taking the time today to speak with us about the future of the world wide web and the internet i think it's entirely fitting that the creator of the web is here to talk about the direction the web may be going in the few sure and i particularly appreciated in your opening statement to your listing of some core values the phrases i wrote down where universality independence blank canvas no with you and with ranking member upped and the other distinguished members for ten thank you for taking the time today to speak with us about the future of the world wide web and the internet i think it's entirely fitting that the creator of the web is here to talk about the direction the web may be going in the future and i particularly appreciated in your opening statement to your listing of some core values the phrases i wrote down where universality independence blank canvas no ownership global society and i'm going to remember those one of the things that you have written that has caught my attention sir tim is that some countries have done a better job than others including the united states in making sure that the internet continues to be a neutral communications medium that's a quote around your words on the other hand china for example has sharply restricted its citizens access to the for the web my question is to direct you perhaps talk about some of the policies that these countries have adopted the ones we could be learning from and what are the lessons that we as u s policymakers could be taking away from their experiences well of and in fact i was lucky that when i was developing the web more or less i was the point where i was at the leading edge of that sort of that explosion it was just becoming politically acceptable in europe can people can read what people can publish i'm i feel very at home in united states this as a as appreciating free speech and openness of communication talk some of some of these debates about policy hinge very much about the commercial aspects but i remember the communication is not just for commercial reasons commercial bias is not the only basket with political bias of course really set up the commercial economy or the market economy which we need this open to commercial openness and fairness so i think so i i think it's a pity that there are places where the open internet connection isn't allowed i can see that for those countries making a change from a very restricted free internet society to a possibly more open to a more open society is not something which is easy so i wouldn't expect to see you go down a certain ro censorship in the internet and that in general the truth will out and information will flow and those countries will have to move with time one way or another it's just a question of how they transition let me see if i can follow up with you as you know and you mentioned the business aspect many of the most successful internet businesses have been based in the united states what might be the implications for some of these businesses and consumers if we don't take some of the steps that you've very tempted to move yes the good answer thank you thank you very much  i think the gentle lady i have not asked my question so i think i'll take this opportunity at this time but if anyone else has any question which they would like to oppose to search him i think that we can accomplish that you stayed in your testimony that when you invented the web and launch that you didn't need to ask anyone's permission first and you talk about the universal of the of the web tell us what that means in terms of future innovation complete that technology form of our blank slate internet technology allows me to write a program which would communicate with another program one program signs up for number of the first and that's the only then that that port number distinguishes the traffic between those two programs and traffic between other programs and the internet passes that information across now it's true for running over for overflow connections but essentially thing is that the internet technology was designed so that anybody could go out and invent whatever they could imagine to run on top of it just as a computer alone from my parents so you don't so you travel the world you see broadband speeds all around the globe how would the united states compare in terms of deployment and affordability what is your impression as to how the united states is doing in terms of speed that we're providing to the american people i can't i shouldn't give you attempt to give you a good answer there because the people who analyze this i'm sure that th been a year or two ago i remember there was a claim that the french situation was the french were actually beating the americans when it came to the dollar price but but i think really the same spirit of making  a faster and cheaper connection is this is fairly pervasive but i can't give you accurate figures thank you you say that the world wide web consortium will only standardize new protocols and technologies if they can you have to download different players to play their information from different places there are competing standards which are not royalty free that's fine it's unlikely that you can't get an open source copy of their own a very limited number of the talking about it and you would not be getting all that information from the web browser on your blackberry and i think it's important for the committee to hear that sentence hand had there been had there been a fee there would be no investment the investment standards protocols guidelines recommendations everything that's necessary to maintain this incredible invention from the word go when i put out the specs for the first browser and and so over on the net contributions came in from across the planet from india from israel so the web development community has always been international so from very early days internationalization of the technology has been very important and when we meet together we try to make sure that we are very fair about different cultures and different and different languages and that we use the  want us to keep with us i suppose the fact that communication is between people is what makes us a society what makes the human race the human race personal diaries and all kinds of things which makes our society our society and some of those things are very crucial to us so we have learned over the generations that protecting the music communication is really important for the world wide web chairman testimony writes a lesson from proliferation of new applications and services on top the web infrastructure is that innovation will happen provided it has a platform of open technical standards flexible scalable architecture and access to the standards  we're talking about being able to use the web technology itself without having to pay a fee for the underlying infrastructure nothing to do with the royalties which we probably pay on at much greater might than all of the members have made that comment to me so we thank you and if possible would like to be able to continue to consult with you well over the years to get your advice as to which is the wisest course in any one of these areas that our country in the world should pursue thank you jerry this hearing is adjourn