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Who made the tools for the Gold rush?

  • David Overton profile
    David Overton
    7 December 2016 - updated 4 years ago
  • 2 comments
    Total votes: 1

Our first interim report

/futurium/en/file/20161124interimreportv31pdf-020161124_interim_report_v3.1.pdf

PDF icon20161124_interim_report_v3.1.pdf
is now a few days old.  There's a lot of food for thought in there!  But is it a bit one sided?  Is it a bit idealistic? I don't see the commercial sharks swimming around, but I do see the intellectual conviction to make a safer internet.

Now distributed architecture and decentralised governance are very very important to readers of this blog and participants in the consultation and relate to the data sovereignty theme.

But clearly work on this appears to be at the cost of working on more device and interface innovation.

/futurium/en/file/goldjpggold.jpg

Gold's a nice end product, but who made all the cash?

My first job was in mining.  I mined Platinum.  A popular story in that profession stems from this question "Who made all the money out of any gold rush?"  Well, it turns out it wasn't the guys digging and panning!  It was the guys that sold shovels and the pans!

And what are the shovels and pans of the internet? Like in 1849 it's the stuff that helps us access the scarce and hidden values.  As individuals these are smart devices and their interfaces.  We'll pay stupidly large amounts of money to get our hands on these tools and to be slick in their use.  As a consequence of the rechannelling of profits into further developments, their designers have shaped the internet.

/futurium/en/file/usingzapparjpgusing_zappar.jpg

New ways of engaging with the internet
New ways of mining the internet

Right now I don't see much "tool maker" ebracing going on in the consultation. 

Is this what Europe wants?

Ask yourself:-

1) By focussing all our attention on the governance of the internet are we delegating all device and interface (and other tool) innovation to the USA-Apple- and Korea-Samsung?

2) Is there a European base for the innovations that will benefit from the changes to the internet?  -Can anyone pick-up from where Nokia and Ericsson left off?

3) What interventions would help start-ups in this area?

If we crack these, then Europe earns the funds it needs by selling the products the world demands.  My feeling is that to over focus on decentralisation will mean we always leave the shiny bits of innovation to others.

But okay, looking at governance and decentralisation, how about these two questions...

4) Looking at the governance, should we not be spending the money on upgrading lawyers?  The law lags so far behind the internet developments these days.  Should they not be operating at a new speed?  Law 2.0?

5) What happens when a business set up to deal with sensitive data goes insolvent? When it's no longer responsible for data management to ISO standards? When the business itself has been broken up and the data sold off with the hard drives?

Keep engaging guys!  Answer these questions by the end of tomorrow and you could be immortalised into the next report!

Keep tapping

David

 

Tags: 
Gold mininginternet miningdevicesinterfacesdecentralisinggovernance

Comments

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David Overton's picture
David Overton,
08/12/2016 18:25

Hi John!

Love it when someone can join in the mining analogies ;-).  And I guess my thinking was closer to the surface and extracting values from the rocks, rather than extracting rocks from the ground.  But in answer to your points

1) Like the volcanic mash (sorry geologists!) in which the gold sits, the fundamentals of the internet were laid down a long time ago with technology that was okay at the time.  And there the values would have stayed.  Barely exploitable, until someone made it desirable to exploit! In the internet I propose that that "desire" has a lot to do with devices and interfaces... the bit the human engages with.  So here's another question; Is it possible to drive the changes you want to see in the internet by placing a new and desirable device into the hands of the general public?

2) Okay, so if there's a positive answer to the above idea, there's a big open space in Europe where a start-up might disrupt an increasingly monopolistic field of devices!

3) Does the Web Science Institute bring these things together?

4)  Ha ha Like it!  Why invest in lawyers when the perpetrators are so many steps ahead?  So we need a more sophistocated way of citadeling ourselves on-line?  Are we back to Cybergeddon again?

5) Yep.  This is the area that scares a lot of people.  I may take a decision with my data that keeps me happy in my life time (perhaps it even reduces my life insurance premium for the years I have left).  But the scenario of your data going beyond your lifetime and coming back to visit your offspring (as would happen if your dna data became common currency on the internet) is a great context to ponder just what we need to keep secret.

 

 

Total votes: 2
John Grant's picture
John Grant,
07/12/2016 20:29

(1) Apple and Samsung make connected devices, but they aren't a force in the areas of the Internet that have the most urgent problems, the ones we need to fix first; that's companies like Cisco and Huawei. To pursue the analogy, you're asking about extracting gold from the ore whereas I think there's a big problem with the machinery that lifts the ore out of the mine. But the issue's the same: we know TCP/IP is seriously broken, and we know a lot about how you would build something better, but groups that ought to be able to do something about it (such as 3GPP) are just kicking the can down the road. We need to try to replicate what a small group at Acorn did at the end of the 1980s, realising that the offerings from the incumbent (mostly American) suppliers weren't good enough and designing something (the ARM) which would be better.

(2) Not really.

(3) A competition, open to all, to find the best tech for NGI. That kind of innovation almost never comes from big corporates; you need the kind of peope who wouldn't work for a big corporate. Or even for a university, because these days universities are too much like big corporates.

(4) Better to spend it on systems that don't let the bad guys in than on taking the bad guys to court. And anything that ends in .0 isn't much better than a beta-test version.

(5) I think that's part of a bigger question, about who owns the data. Again, maybe we can find some tech that will help.

Total votes: 5