Internet as a Human Right

Transcript

next speaker is taken Klein she's the business development of orchid protocol which is working on a cool way of looking at the Internet as an inseparable part of nature thank you thank you so first I want to thank everyone at Eid Con for for having us and hosting this event I also want to thank all of you not only for making it all the way over to Sydney but for coming to this talk so today I will be talking about the Internet as a basic human right so the internet was born with good intentions Tim

berners-lee famously said that the Internet is an open platform that allows anyone to share information access opportunities and collaborate across boundaries and I do believe that the internet did begin in this pure state I remember when I first discovered the Internet I thought the newspaper model is dead in the water tomorrow information is finally free to flow no one needs to paid for in for education anymore you can just go online and access it but it didn't go as I optimistically and almost naively thought it would the internet wrongfully taught us that things should be free and for those of us that have taken an

economics class we know that there's no such thing as free lunch so the problem with the Internet as it currently exists today is that someone needs to own and operate the database and this has given us this degree of centralization that we see today and these database owners and operators have began to monetize our attention and monetize our data so the internet as it exists today is very fragmented in the u.s. it's very corporate controlled in the EU its GDP are regulated in China it's very state controlled and in Russia they've talked about doing an offline experiment where they just go dark to the rest of the

world so how many of you use protonmail the end-to-end encrypted email service well in they attempted to block the server's about two weeks ago how many of you use telegram the encrypted messaging service most of us do well Iran and Russia have been known to block this due to the great degree of encryption that it provides so what do you do when you wake up and you can't communicate to your friends or family because unless it's on a platform that is highly censored or surveilled censorship is a problem there's something called the panoptic on effect and this is when you know that you're being monitored and censored so you just

begin to self monitor and self-censor and you're in constant fear of being watched we've gone from this open platform full of potential to perfectly manicured walled gardens and humans are inherently imperfect it's almost engrained in our DNA so it's a very dangerous path to expect humans to be perfect and constantly watch and monitor them so the Internet has become an integral part of the human experience and it needs all of us not just the few but everyone of us and in 2016 the UN declared the Internet as a basic human right similar to electricity something

that we need to use that is integral part of our day to day experience the Internet is the same it's a natural resource and the more we distribute this natural resource the less likely there is for an abuse of power so I have a call to action for all of you let's take the internet back from these large papa ganda machines and large monopolies so I joined orchid because I believe that privacy and communications are some of the core use cases for blockchain technology why are we building this encrypted database I believe it's for private communication and VPN usage is rising so one out of four Internet users have used a VPN in the last 30 days and

in places like Indonesia VPN usage is almost 38% but VPNs are under threat as well so 60 of the top free VPN applications on the app store are based in China which means that that information is basically just going straight to the Chinese government at orchid we're distributed so we can't prove that the nodes are not collecting that data but they can't aggregate that data so our mission is to create an open Internet that's accessible to anyone anywhere so we've built a marketplace for a bandwidth and this is built on top of aetherium it's a VPN client application we actually launched our

alpha 4 ed con so if you stop by our booth we can demo that for you so you can earn tokens for your bandwidth for your internet connection and you can also set up as a bridge node for a multi hop security this is our technology so we've been for about two years building we've been pretty heads down and and we're finally launching in June so the probabilistic micro payments piece this is essentially how we run linking transactions on aetherium for this degree of privacy the medallions piece this is our civil resistance using a proof of stake technology and then bandwidth smuggling this is essentially how we are routing around China's firewall and this is this is the code is

actually pluggable so imagine someone in a pressed regime if they suddenly the the firewall is updated and they can't get access to the Internet they're incentivized by getting access to the internet again and also upgrading the entire network so we've we're creating a permission free market for communication so what's next for orchid we just launched our alpha 4 ad con and we'll be updating our white paper this month and next month we'll begin beta testing but we do need your help so if any of you are interested in consuming or providing bandwidth for orchid tokens I would love to talk to you if you're interested in helping people and oppressed regimes

gain access to the Internet also if you're interested in being a part of our beta stop by our booth and if you would like to host an event here in Australia or in your home country we would love to talk to you this is my email take a network it thank you [Applause]