The internet for the people initiative, as he described it, is an attempt to make a people-centered internet focusing on the value of the internet to individual people, rather than organizations. This involves making the information on it more local and in local languages and frames of reference. He talked about providing in places where there is non, and making it sustainable - he said you can't just drop internet infrastructure and leave, you need training to help people keep that infrastructure up and running. He said penetration of internet technology has been made more difficult as a result of the Arab Spring: governments in internet poor areas (which are frequently authoritarian) are reluctant to build internet infrastructure because of concerns it will cause population to organize and ask for more democracy and rights.
Vint talked about how our technology has outraced our inhibition about its social consequences. He talked about how this impacts privacy, for example. In the past, when people lived in small towns, there was no privacy - everyone knew what everyone did. When we moved to the city, people feel anonymous because of the mass of other people around, and the ability to spread information via rumor and small town social chains disappeared. As such, people got the sense of privacy. However modern social media brought back the loss of privacy we got used to. Also, now you can lose privacy not by something you do, but by something other people do. For example, Facebook tags faces in photos uploaded to it, and any unwitting people in the background get tagged as well, so without even being aware of it, a record of where and when they are can be captured.
Discussing the Internet of Things, he raised the concern it would be used to create attack networks against the web (which has already happened). Companies are racing to produce products but not thinking enough about control and authority over these devices.
He was asked about IPV6, and said at the time they defined the protocol for the internet they could not conceive they would ever need more than 4 billion addresses (as that was pretty much the entire population of the earth). Now it's clear that's not enough, and he hopes IOT will accelerate it's adoption.
Asked about possible impacts of government funding cuts, he said he's concerned it would primarily hurt what he calls "curiosity projects", which are focused on long term research that doesn't have immediate benefit, but which often has long term benefit.
Asked about blockchain, he said he doesn't feel it scales so well. He's not persuaded this is the only way to achieve distributed ledger. He's worried about the surrounding software around it, which may be controlled by a very small number of organizations.
On keeping the internet open and neutral, he said he feels there needs to be a legal framework to help keep net neutrality. He also said he's hoping to see some social maturity to make the internet a safer place than it is now.
Asked about the walled garden effect of companies like facebook, he said it was attempted in the past - AOL tried and failed to create a walled garden; he's similarly hoping users will push to break through the walled garden.
He said, "8-9 year old kids today use the internet; I didn't get to use the internet until I was 28 years old, and I had to invent it first!"
He also told an anecdotal story about his wife, who had lost her hearing in a young age, and had implants that send signals to her nerves, simulating the activity that her inner ear would normally be doing. This returned her hearing to her after many years of deafness. One interesting ability she gained, he said, is that she has a microphone unit she carries and which transmits sounds to her implants. This unit has a range of up to 15 meters, so she can leave it somewhere and walk away, and still hear what's going on where the microphone is. He says she sometimes at a restaurant leaves the device on the table and goes to the bathroom, and he has to warn everyone not to talk about her while she's away because she can hear every word...
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