May 8th, 2019 - Category: Change
How does one even begin to explore a massive, open-ended question like this? With headline news articles everyday exposing another data breach, privacy violation, or online security issue, hasn’t the Internet become intrinsically unhealthy? Yet everyday we also interact effortlessly with our family and friends, automatically pay our bills, enjoy television and video, and satisfy our curiosity in a myriad of ways.
Luckily our friends at Mozilla have recently published the results of their extensive research project to address this question which they simply call, “The Internet Health Report 2019.” It is the culmination of a project they started in 2017.
You might remember our friends at Mozilla from my recent post, “The Firefox Browser, Internet Freedom, Web Literacy, (yawn…)” which explains the fascinating history of an organization founded in the earliest days of the internet. Today it continues to shape our online world as we know it through advocacy, products such as the privacy focused Firefox browser, mobile browsers, and other products that fulfill their mission “Internet for people, not profit.”
However despite their best efforts, the report is still difficult to grok. Mozilla has published a “short version” as a PDF document which still is over 80 pages! After quite a bit of exploration, I found that the best way to read it is to start on the main page and click on “ReadMe.” There you will find a section called, “How to explore this website?” Taking five minutes to understand how the report is organized is the key to accessing the wealth of information it contains which is broken down into addressing five major issues about the current health of the Internet:
- Is it safe? - “The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us.”
- How open is it? - “The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate. But openness is not guaranteed – it’s always under attack.”
- Who is welcome? - “It’s not just about how many people have access to the internet, but whether that access is safe and meaningful for all of us.”
- Who can succeed? - “Getting online isn’t enough on its own. Everyone needs skills to read, write and participate in the digital world.”
- Who controls it? - “A few large players dominate much of the online world, but the internet is healthier when it is controlled by many.”
Mozilla’s Internet Health Report is clearly a labor of love. It focuses on the issues from a positive perspective rather than the more common negative dire headlines of major news sources. As they say in the second paragraph of their ReadMe, “this publication is neither a country-level index nor a doomsday clock. We invite you to join us in assessing what it means for the internet to be healthy, and to participate in setting an agenda for how we can work together to create an internet that truly puts people first.”
If you have only a couple minutes to browse it, maybe start with what they call their 2019 Spotlights: “Let’s ask more of AI,” “The power of cities,” and “Rethinking digital ads.” These are so interesting that my next post will provide a deeper dive into one of my own areas of interest, Artificial Intelligence. Like it or not, AI has become an invisible partner in our lives shaping everything from the news we read to the photos we share. I agree with Mozilla, Let’s Ask More of AI, stay tuned!