The Internet - A Real Test of Faith

 (Homepage photo by David Rose)

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"JABE's motto, ‘honesty, integrity and social responsibility' springs to mind when I think about the very foundations of the internet."

In a fascinating to a packed room at Taylor Wessing, Professor Jonathan Zittrain, highlighted how the internet encounters problems "if anybody along the chain turns out not to be of good faith."

Zittrain explained how in 2008 Pakistan's state-owned telecommunications company managed to knock YouTube offline for two hours and  "there was nothing that Google was privileged to do about it."

What solved this problem? "a bunch of unpaid people who, on a sunny day would rather be inside, reading messages about networks." According to Zittrain, this is a happy and worrisome tale, happy because there are people willing to help and receive nothing in return, "talk about honesty integrity and social responsibility!" Worrisome because of how fragile the internet can be.

Zittrain described how this notion of civic responsibility pertains to many other dotcoms such as Wikipedia, Innocentive, Couchsurfing and Mechanical Turk. These are generally positive applications but also offer opportunities for subversion to unscrupulous members of society.

Rabbi Zvi Lieberman, JABE consultant and facilitator highlighted that the development of the first trade routes and banking systems were based on trust, every charity, every community is built on trust "there is an inherent responsibility that we all have to act with integrity".

Zittrain laid down a challenge to all internet users, to confront ourselves with the ethical implications of what we do online.

"We need to treat that instant before we forward something as an ethical event". This won't guarantee against potentially sensitive messages or images being forwarded but it may prevent things from exploding on the internet.

We need to establish norms that allow the internet community to "nudge users back when they step out of line and that chain of trust starts to break down".

If this system of self-policing fails, Zittrain believes we might find ourselves "having to go for stronger medicine including invocation of law that has its own stronger side effects and undesirable consequences."