What Happened at the E-G8 Forum, According to People Who Want to Keep the Internet Open

The inaugural Sarkozy-led e-G8 Forum just closed in Paris, with vague pronouncements about how the world’s biggest governments and corporations may or may not guide the future of the Internet. On the sidelines, an improvised post-game press conference featured civil society leaders, including Jeff Jarvis, Lawrence Lessig, Susan P. Crawford, and Yochai Benkler, holding forth on what might have been forgotten during the government and corporate-leaning conference.

Here’s how Alex Howard described the press conference, in his report at O’reilly Radar:

“The open Internet is the basis for democracy flourishing around the world,” said Susan Crawford, an American law professor and former White House official. “Access to the Internet is fundamental. These are the most important policies that government should be embracing. We want to make sure that other voices are heard.” While Lessig acknowledged that business was an important constituency, he reminded press conference attendees of how the Internet has grown since the ARPANET first connected universities. The people who built the internet “weren't originally business, it was civil society,” said Lessig. A “huge part of the Internet is not here [at the eG8] and especially the innovating companies that five years from now will think of this equivalent of Twitter, they were not here.” There is much to cherish and value in that growth over time. “The critical change produced by the digital network environment is the radical decentralization of the capacity to speak, to create, to innovate, to see together, to socialize, the radical distribution of the poor means of production, computations, communications, storage, sensing, capture human sociality that which gets us together inside the experience, being there on the ground,” said Benkler. What an open Internet allows is the radical decentralization of the means of production, said Benkler. “That is true for the first time since the industrial revolution, that people can actually, with the things they own, capture the world and do something that is at the very core of the most advanced economies.” He emphasized the critical importance of preserving a framework that is “open, free-flowing, flexible, adaptive to change, and inviting,” so that one person’s sacrifice in Sidi Bouzid “can be translated throughout the Arab world into a moment of mobilization. That's new, that's what is critical.” Benkler was baffled that opposition to the open model of innovation persists after 15 years, as if “we’ve learned nothing,” calling the assumptions made on the intellectual property panel on the first day of the eG8 laughable. “Whether liberty, equality or fraternity, we all have to be on the same page about retaining an open Net,” he said.

And here’s video of Lessig’s valuable introductory speech during the forum:

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