The opening address at the e-G8 conference in Paris from the French president certainly woke up the assembled digerati.
John Perry Barlow, co-founder of open-internet campaigner Electronic Frontier Foundation, set the tone when he tweeted a previous Nicolas Sarkozy quote – “The internet is the new frontier, a territory to conquer” – with the sharp reply: “And I am in Paris to stop him.”
Opinions seem to be mixed as to whether M Sarkozy’s latest diatribe against the wild-west tendencies of the internet was a hardening or a softening of the line that created the notorious “three-strikes” law against piracy.
When the first panel convened after the president’s speech, comments from venture capitalists and university professors defending the free spirit of the internet received the most applause.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive president, reprised his anti-regulation line from last week’s Big Tent event in London, saying: “Before we decide we need some regulatory solution let’s ask if there is a technological solution that can scale that we can all get around. We will move a lot more quickly than one of the governments, let alone all of the governments.”
Jean-Bernard Levy, chief executive of French media-telecoms group Vivendi, also took a pop at the “hyper regulation” in Europe that he sees as a “major threat” to the European internet ecosystem.
Yet both content owners and internet firms agreed that controlling intellectual property violation – another core Sarkozy tenet – was necessary, although they offered few tangible examples of how to do so. (Mr Schmidt flagged ContentID, YouTube’s copyright filtering tool, but did not take the opportunity to again bemoan the “anti-democratic” evils of site-blocking.)
At least Christine Lagarde, the French finance minster on the panel, tackling a question on the UK’s current clash between privacy and the internet, admitted the difficulties in striking any balance between freedom and regulation online: “We are exploring, we are stumbling, we are trying to identify what will be the right tools [and] legal principles.”
Perhaps the most interesting moment of the first panel – which also included John Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, and Sunil Mittal of Indian operator Bharti Airtel – was unrelated to the internet freedom argument.
Joe Schoendorf, of venture firm Accel Partners, asked how the fact that the world’s average age was now 27 years old would affect the global economy.
Jean-Bernard Levy noted that “most of us are probably slightly above 27 years old”, prompting nervous laughter from the audience.
Eric Schmidt’s answer was intriguing, given Google’s position today:
“It seems to me there is a platform here [on stage] – a union of all the world’s information, interactive gaming, and location and mobility – that platform is the platform of the 22 year old today. The next generation of great companies will be built on the synthesis of that. If I were 22, I would be obsessed by the gaming which is part of this, the socialisation aspects, and the incredible knowledge I can get in many different areas. The sum of that – a new set of learning methods, a new set of social interactions – we can only imagine.”
Facebook’s 27-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, speaks at the e-G8 event tomorrow.
