thank you thank you all give everybody a couple of seconds here to get settled in  thank you as a 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 a digital future of the united states and this series of oversight hearings focus 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 szell aspirations all 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 zero 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 importan to our national economic security to global communications free speech and to myriad applications addressing health care education and cultural and 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 guest 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 van 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 of well thank you mr chairman it is a pleasure to be here i appreciate you convening today's hearing 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 relationships 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 engaging in questions how civil court to have any candidate 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 to 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 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 election 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 overestimates a 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 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's a power to control access to information and content is becoming increasingly concentrated in a handful of large media and telecommunications companies it's this is 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 and continue to speak to the many whether or s pleased that your chairmanship was rudely interrupted twelve years ago but 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 when 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 and 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 a little 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 thank the members of the committee for their interest in this matter i think you for bringing before us your timothy berners lee who is the man who invented the world wide web and who has made what most people call the internet it's not only permission pervasive but also is in 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 could go to deliver a message with the digits of your hand now days are dogs have that have to type the tiniest keys on a blackberry or some similar device on these disruptive technologies the power of world wide web 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 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 to know that your labors in this matter in this subcommittee will be very very important indeed we will begin by hurrying sir berners lee's evaluation of where the web stands today and where it will be headed in the future i am particularly interested the answers to these questions first 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 devices as simple easy 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 dress 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 a meant of the telecommunications act in one thousand nine hundred four it will mean remain so and i know that you mr chairman this committee and the subcommittee will be working very hard on that matter she too with that those thoughts the internet 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 is 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 rich in public debate in our country it has already greatly enhanced the nation's discourse on public affairs but until it is pervasive as broadcast media and newspapers and until new web sites truly compete with those provisional media outlets and the websites they control the web's 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 berners lee has to say about these issues but i also appreciate hearing the view on the internet and with policy matters from thursday 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 i thank the gentleman gentleman from florida mr stearns the chairman thank you very much and 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 altruistic in his desire because he wasn't a person that ran out and try to make a lot of money and he worked for not for profit organization was behind the scenes and in many ways represents this philanthropic way that he wanted to help the world and he did so indeed according to a december two thousand and six or of a 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 internet to via product sixty seven percent went online to get news and now almost forty five percent use it for online banking when you look at th 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 for us 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 male w a lecture on it records 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 and quality obviously is enhanced now this is just one example of how the future of the internet will improve our lives and so it's clear today that this individual can give us remarkable insight from his perspective what we can do healthcare education and as i mentioned others i want to thank you mr chairman for holding this hearing i think it's a delight for all of us to see this individual because we've heard so much about a so i compliment you for bringing him to start this session in one hundred  subcommittee fifty years ago a computer fill filled an entire room and processors performed at less than one thousand seven speed to do today our witness 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 one thousand nine hundred ninety 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 america a young female i t genius is discovering the secrets of the computer 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 this and 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 in for mason 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 thank you generally the gentleman from texas mr green thank you mr chairman i've asked my full statement be placed in the record without objection but i'd like to welcome sir berners lee because of the success that i come from an area in houston and it's a number served area and so my interest has always been more expansion of the world wide web including the programming and limiting the risk of problems on the internet like spam identity theft and fraud but i have to admit most of my my office cannot imagine ten or fifteen years ago doing what we do today without the the internet in the research capabilities that we have congressional research service at the time said going to the library 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 you will be surprised at ten or fifteen or twenty years from now so welcome and i'm glad you're here thanks so much gentleman thank you mr chairman i feel like i'm 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 i've 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 sabrina's 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 life more difficult through cell phones wireless calendars and e mail and sir berners lee you're to blame for all of that 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 that who has access to the latest innovations the only way the worldwide web and all of the innovations that have stemmed from its invention has been able to succeed is through consumer access and use 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 i know you'll back for me to my time i thank the gentleman i don't see any of the members at this time  our witness ice or to meet the burners we who coined the term world wide web wrote the first world wide web server so 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 knight of for the world in providing this incredible ability to communicate will do what i can tell answer some of these questions at least to set the groundwork to put out before us what the things are i feel most important about the web on which we should face it future so i'm here as an 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 there's a very intricate connection between the new piece of new technology 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 but the technology and the constraints 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 e mail when you get e mail on your blackberry you have other people to blame for that so when i was going to do that it's just 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 will always exciting things to happen and which therefore are those things which we should take keep and 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 w progress i don't as a rule try to predict the future i do however express my hopes about the things which i think will going happen it's amazing how all the creative people out there will then take hopes and turn them into reality documentation systems they were all different you have to go to different computers you have to use different software programs and to get different pieces of information often you had to talk to different experts the whole thing was very  nice if all that those pieces of information were in the same system now i seen a lot of people make that decide that and build the big system too and all systems and these systems and all these attempts certainly the ones i watched the sound were failures they failed to include everybody and they failed to include everybody because they insisted on something racist sometimes than you would use a particular computer sometimes you'd use a particular fact people for the lab came from all over the world as focal kind of the 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 we were 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 us what is clear was that she 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 assist that they used particular technology it had to work with people using it's one 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  dimension of university 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 and email systems telephone systems where you can you can telephone 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 that every document every piece of information has what we call you or i think the start h t t p normally the p whatever it is maybe long and complicated and horrible looking but it identifies globally without any other context so that allows me to strike to point out a relationship between two things where no previous relationship has it been anticipated that's really important thing to happen when we're solving more problems to spot those relationships and to be able to represent things those relationships and  the fact that the standards open standards so much is space the standards which dictate how computers talk to each other when you click on a link and your computer goes off to get away a piece of information a 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 dropped the developing it in their garage dropped the whole system like a hot potato because they didn't want to work for the university of minnesota for free in that we can't people working for large companies were told by their lawyers not to read a single part that come together in the world wide web consortium through the world whether confessions patent policy agree progressively agree to put their cards on the table than 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's 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 lairs when i designed 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 where over somebody install 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  technologies also designed just to be a foundation 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 has being developed by somebody yes quite likely some woman who is dreaming about some frustrated or something somebody somewhere and they will develop this thing as a set of 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 the world where consortium up in a mode to change the web architecture they'll just be able to use it and we will use internet arctic architecture and all these things will evolve independently so the separation of layers really has been a key 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 c pull up all the information about the weather about healthcare and information and combine it together if you like it so there's a serious if you like connect things together i should be able to take my photographs and drop them onto my calendar and see where in time they happen to do the same thing with my bank statements but very importantly in the enterprise application in the end the price tend to be stovepipes at the moment and that's great impediment to the in drug discovery business it's very much driven by huge amounts of very complex data and we have of course very dire needs to find out the things like drugs for cancer drugs for aids that's a huge amount of information some of this is you know device also one of the hopes there is that the smaller sizes of come in very much cheaper form with these not only phones that you have but the there are coming out very much cheaper cell phones 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 the to a time when really what we're doing our job 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 the physical device anymore just as the information is now in this information  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 as it happens over i reach my conclusion so we'll  the eight roll calls the conclusion the same one of the amazing things about the weather is that things happen which we didn't predict when somebody creates a new phenomenon like a blog when people design things they design something in the small those things which is the sessile has this large effect they produce a large hopefully beneficial effect how are we going to produce web technology and make sure these are beneficial two ways one is i think we actually have to be aware of this difference between the microscopic rules that govern people and government computers this relationship between the microscopic and the ma 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 ne 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 of 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  that websites one of the things that we do then is try to get people together across disciplines because this is not just computers is people they're governed by laws that govern by psychology and incentives governed by economics we need a lot of there are lots of different ways and different fields which need to look at this as well as computer science and that work engineering so that we call web science we're not done we are just starting we really i think will not seen 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 base them on core values you have or you have a rule of thumb that if the certainly if we stick to certain core values on a microscopic scale good things will happen on a macroscopic scale if we stick to the golden rule everybody should be happy so what 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 is a very important thing we've seen the layering keeping the developments 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 top of the internet and making sure that the web in turn itself is the blank sheet of the blank canvas something which does not constrain 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 yet you know it was based on some ideas that i but internet and the web these two layers are now fundamental infrastructure for the global society it's very important as we develop them we make sure that they don't become controlled by any one company al matter for any one country after the fifteen minute vote followed by a five minute but 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 how we can stay here for another five minutes or so so fred if you'd like to ask some questions thank you and join the testimony and we all have our personal experiences of how this is impact this and for the most part of has been 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 it 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 and i see their new devices in terms of tracking through this in their recipes and you know all of you know turning on ovens and in all these different things that are quite revolutionary from where we were five or six years ago but what are some of the things that we should be looking at as we look at the future in terms of privacy in terms of things that you might on someone not to be able to connect to in terms of pornography or other issues how do we handle some of those they can be used by people with who are doing good things and people doing bad things and the primary first order the job of the web is to be that white flight and of course everybody who which are illegal always have been illegal and continues to be legal one of our the troubles 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 are there internationally don't have the same are issues where there are some important things which technology can help with i suppose one of the general rules of technology we should help make it easy to do the right thing so what's really crazy ample when looking at copyright legislation  you find a picture out there on the web and you want to do the right things you'd like to use it in a report but you're not sure whether you can one of the important things that happens now happening now is massive data about whether what licensing terms are on that picture is more and more being a put into the picture itself or put into the founding documents and automatic tools and systems like the creative commons licenses allowing people to do the right thing so for trying to create systems which prevent people from doing bad 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 the 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 about the r m and the need to do away with the r m how it's a close 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 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 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  which 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 that you shouldn't listen to which is what you because you've backed up somebody else's machine is that you've got access to a little make it clear it'll it'll turn pink if we promote technologies for better data for passing information about information putting on the licensing information putting in only information about who's got rights to 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 it was like ok but what is  sufficient that's the thing i'm must say i'm inclined to trying to make software that you do the right thing for us i don't know i can't we haven't tried their experiment of having something which is like the situation with cd and vinyl records we know which is of your own 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 what the record company processes look like so i think 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 yours song or your movie it's your song is now i did he it's  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 the 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 patent thing on the internet free of patent protection so that that's my huge concern and i really appreciate what you've done asked one of the myths that the big telecom firms like to perpetuate is that the internet has always been free from regulation and that net neutrality 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 first question and my second question is that i'm i'm fascinated by your semantic web that you spoke about when you're in your testimony and you know all of the 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 between legitimate and i can't talk about this in detail i can say that i feel that none 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 and when i was growing up i the i learnt to understand that interfering with her majesty's nails was extremely serious  all right why because well the males from what actually allows the country to function as the countries allows the state to function as a state and here there's a protection of the fourth estate there is the fact that there is for protection of freedom of speech there are a lot of 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 that the internet start to becoming a dominant still function and perhaps open democracy would still function but it wasn't absolutely clear i would always be in favor of earning on the side of keeping the are keeping the medium to be the blank sheet of  blog and every morning if you log on and you have a set of blogs that you read that is a fact which you carefully nurture you carefully nurture your bookmarks because there are things which you do which you trust and which teach you to places that you trust it all the links provide 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 of the solution the general we found for things like pornography on the way we found on gen the solution to this sort of thing is to allow people to label things to allow people to filter the information coming to that child or fence or 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 you used and i think what you're saying when you look around this room you said oh probably some day i was thinking about this room ok but it puts i had the feeling you would say that in a home or in a work environment you would have are you talking about digitize high definition video this or are you talking about give me your idea in the future what these digital displays you should go cover large display areas and so maybe you might expand on that future with digital displays like that different different technologies but they are getting cheaper and so i'm a little concerned that perhaps there should be a protection of neon signs for times square but seriously there will be the lety to put 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 example of going through a rather tedious exercise of trying to book the return flight from washington d c and of the phone for example for imagine that the phone connects with radio technology such as bluetooth to the desk and suppose it determines that if your desk determines that they can trust it with information and realizes that you think you're in a position you can see it and you can then instead of having to communicate on that little screen it then communicate by putting up a map of the map of the flight that it's proposing some pictures of the restaurants where it suggesting 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 is the flight that you're booking has to break out of the phone device it has to really be in the abstract medium just the things are in the web it has devices like this there's a diversity of devices coming to an image 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 the telephone calls i can get games i can do all kinds of things and 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 have which are all screens and any interaction is is  because i like to be able to really write off when i go down to read people have different different personal tastes or what they want to carry around and how they want to use it so i guess what if you take any of photographs and put them on greeting cards you can put them on a calendar if you can do all kinds of things that is that the type of thing you're talking about in terms of manipulation from software to software is that what you meant i wasn't clear on that the it's about being able to connect through from one application to another so for example imagine that i'm there i 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 so the point is this is allowable expense so now the bank statement software only provides me with a traditional financial analysis but however there's a date there the date actually would fit on my calendar if i take that later and try chairman machine could probably do that in the future analyze and said this is what you spent on this day at this time because you throw all that information together into that one application able to tell you and that's what he's talking about the future thank you thank you   the issue of health care came up every single day that i campaigned i have to tell your thousand stories about the problems people were having with the cost of their health care the one store oversight is from a jewelry store owner in salem indiana he's paying a thousand 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 and we're  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 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 e m t can then pick up an information find out your blood type and so on there is all kinds of technologies in place on the on the web that people can refer to protect 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 you know give people some relief 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 about the patients including perhaps videos of previous consult the consultant sylvia videos and pictures of  operations and so on to give them hope giving the doctor access to all the data which they legally have about the patient and all the relevant data also from the sum of medical knowledge about s a few questions of this this issue of the semantic web is intriguing to me and what potential is out there for we were just talking here briefly that we sort of do that with dogs now you plan to chip in an i s o standard at least for a dedication 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 can 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 you do you see the potential of being an mit engineer and a great thinker and visionary where you can ever move not just data 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 vis seen that it could be different and pushing it and then leading putting getting the standards out there without there by a few other people who see the vision and get the twinkle in their eye and are prepared to invest up front because they realize what it could be like if everybody test the privacy policy of a web site just because as i said if you like hygiene issues because they just people want to go shopping they don't want to have to worry about privacy and fell and that's really developed there and you have somebody whether it's a scientist or a government agent or a person at home who's trying to how do you give them the best access to all this what is the equivalent of a spreadsheet or whatever it is that you need to  software which is responsible software which allows people to be responsible that leads to an issue we've dealt with a lot in in this some committed in the full committee things like spyware pop up ads all 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 ever 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 are this should be tackled a problem that's it may be that we need when we send email will we won't be so anonymous but you know system was put together it was designed originally for an environment where everybody were friends talking to each other very academic threats to the world wide web that we should be aware of what should we be thinking about especially long term i think what i hope for the net neutrality thing is the short term thing i think in most of the world people regard net neutrality is such an o the to protect all the new markets the future markets which come in the future so i think that understanding has come to american industry and majority of over the last few years but it's today to speak with us about the future of the world wide web and the internet i think it's entirely fitting that creator of the web is here to talk about the direction the wind may be going in the future and i particularly appreciated in your opening statement to your  listing of some core values the phrases that i wrote down where universality independence like kansas you know ownership global society and i'm going to remember that was 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 when you are on the other hand china for example has sharply restricted its citizens access to the for the web my question is to direct you to perhaps talk about some of the policies that these countries have adopted the ones we could be learning a place where in the internet was forcing protocols were produced and it spread across the internet spread across the world and in fact i was lucky that when i was developing the web more or less i was at the point where i was at the 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 and those countries will have to move with time one way or another it's just a question of how the transition let me see if i can follow let slip that is you know when you mentioned the business aspect many of the most successful internet businesses have been based in the united states and what might be the implications for some of these businesses and consumers if we don't take some of the steps that you've mentioned for example to ensure a net neutrality into law could the u s l  i think the answer in a way 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 accomplish that you stated 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 universality of the web tell us what that means in terms of future innovation but i agree on the port number of the first and that's the only then that that port number distinguishes the traffic between those two programs from perfect between other programs and the internet part of that information across no configured for running over for overflow connections but essential 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 i learn from my parents so you don't need anyone's permission and as a result entrepreneurial activity can watch i'd like to be able to download i could download i have on the sound of web browser which didn't come with it i downloaded it from the internet or run it on the phone so and when anything is  known so you travel the world you seem 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 that a good answer there because there are people who analyze this as i'm sure some internet service providers offering very high bandwidth or with a very complete inclusive international phone service for a very competitive race which saw one point maybe maybe new years ago i remember that it was a pain that the french situation was the french were actually beating the americans when it came to the dollar price curve but i think really the same spirit of making talking about it and you would not be getting all of that information from the web browser on your blackberry and so i think it's important for the committee to hear that sentence out of the hands that have the venus had to be in a fee that would be no investment the investment people made in the web was made by volunteers in their garages late at night it was made by people system managers who when their workday was done decided they didn't sell something like a web browser and when form of faith they weren't going anywhere near let me ask you a final question which is that i would like you to talk about the international nature of the world wide web the consortium and the importance of building consensus across continents on 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 so over on th contributions came in from across the planet from hawaii from india from israel so the web development community has always been international so from very early days internationalization is a 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 in different languages and that we use the best  message you are like those three numbers we deliberate over the next couple of years on all of the issues that could impact on the worldwide web could you give us just one and a summary message view want us to keep with us as we move forward i suppose the fact that communication is between people is what makes us a society what makes the human race the human r 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 means of communication is really important for the world wide web chairman testimony you write the lesson from the proliferation of new applications and services on top the web infrastructure is it innovation will happen provided it has a platform of open technical standards for example scalable architecture and access to the standards and a royalty free term and he said that repeatedly but can you please just differentiate that you do not mean royalty free content because i think some people will confuse the two royalty free platform the architecture of the internet at much greater weight then 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 over the years to get your advice as to which is