Moderator: Michael Kleinman, Director, Silicon Valley Initiative, Amnesty, AIUSA.
Panelists: Lia Holland (Campaigns and Communications Director, Fight for the Future).
Mai Ishikawa Sutton (Co-founder and editor of COMPOST, an online magazine about the digital commons, as well as a Digital Commons Fellow with the Commons Network and a contributor to the Internet Archive’s work on the decentralized web).
Nathan Schneider (Assistant Professor, Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and Director, Media Enterprise Design Lab).
Abstract: The internet in the West today is dominated by a handful of companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, TikTok, and Twitter. Each company sets the terms and conditions for how individuals engage with their platform and can potentially ban them according to those terms, including for their speech. In return for free access to these platforms, individuals provide personal information and effectively lose control over that information. In some countries, governments have pressured tech companies to censor and provide information on individuals and groups that the government disfavors.
Web3 – sometimes called the Distributed Web – potentially represents a fundamental change in this dynamic, especially as regards the question of control. The number “3” implies a specific historical view of how the web evolved, from an initial “open” state in the 1990s and early 2000s (web1) towards ever greater corporate centralization and power, leading to the dominance of a handful of Big Tech corporations today (web2). It posits web3 as the next step in this evolution, towards a more decentralized future, in which our online experience is not shaped (or not only shaped) by these companies.
This panel will examine the positive and negative implications that web3 has for human rights, including access and equity, privacy, social mobilization online, and other issues.
GHTC 2022. September 11th, 2022.
