English subtitles for clip: File:Internet Hall of Fame 2014 Michael Kende interview.webm

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Well I’m an economist, and in the late 90s
I was working for the FCC, the Federal Communications

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Commission in the United States, and there
was a series of mergers that took place between

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the big Internet backbones of the time.

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Now a lot of them don’t exist or they were
bought up but they were NCI, Worldcom, UUNet,

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Sprint.

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So I got involved into looking at the antitrust
implications of those mergers, but that really

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led me into the whole area of Internet connection
because what was interesting at the time,

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and it’s still true today, is that these
companies operated in fiber optics and wires

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across the country and when they sent telephone
calls over them they were regulated and when

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they sent Internet traffic over them, they
weren’t.

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We wanted to make sure it stayed that way
throughout the mergers, and so I really got

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interested in how these guys can interconnect
without regulation on the mergers.

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That’s one of the topics I stuck to, then
I went into consulting, did a number of interesting

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projects for the Internet Society, and I joined
last August as the Chief Economist.

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Well I think that really this interconnection
issue that when I was at the FCC, I wrote

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this paper called The Digital Handshake, that
really talked about how this interconnection

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could work and self-regulate on the Internet
using the same wires they were regulated on,

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as I said.

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But really, it was one of the first papers
that really documented why the FCC and why

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one shouldn’t regulate this.

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I’ve really been building on that.

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Even as the system has evolved over the last
12, 13 years, it’s really stayed the same.

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So I’m quite proud of that one because it
really showed how the Internet could work

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without regulation.

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I think it remains true today.

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Well, I think it’s overall sunny but some
snow and clouds I guess.

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Clearly there are some issues, but I think
there’s general optimism that things are

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looking good and that there are bright sunny
days ahead.

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I think it’s more hopes than concerns.

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I think that the real exciting thing is that
we’re about hit 3 billion users by one count.

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It should happen in June.

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So that’s an amazing number, but that’s
still about 40% of the world.

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I think that one of the things that the Internet
Society stands for is that the Internet is

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for everyone, and I think that with the mobile
technology we’re really going to hit 4,

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5 billion soon.

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I think that’s the really exciting prospect
that keeps me going.

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We have to address the privacy and security
issues that have come up.

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So much of what we’re doing in our lives,
we’re putting on the Internet and we have

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to be sure that the things we want to remain
private, remain private.

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When we want to be anonymous, it remains anonymous.

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So I think that we need a simple and easy
way to protect our information and make sure

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it stays safe as we increasingly put our lives
online, as we increasingly interact with our

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banks, with our government, with everything
online.

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So I think that’s going to have to be addressed,
and I’m sure it will be and the Internet

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Society will play its part.