The Internet of Elsewhere
Farivar, Cyrus
In his new book, “The Internet of Elsewhere,” Cyrus Farivar looks at the role of the Internet as a catalyst in transforming communications, politics, and economics. In it, Farivar explores the Internet’s history and effects in four distinct and, to some, surprising societies — Iran, Estonia, South Korea, and Senegal. He profiles Web pioneers in these countries and, at the same time, surveys the environments in which they each work. After all, contends Farivar, despite California’s great success in creating the Internet and spawning companies like Apple and Google, in some areas the United States is still years behind other nations. Don’t forget: – Skype was invented in Estonia–the same country that developed a digital ID system and e-voting; - Iran was the first country in the world to arrest a blogger, in 2003; - South Korea is the most wired country on the planet, with faster and less expensive broadband than anywhere in the United States; - Senegal may be one of sub-Saharan Africa’s best chances for greater Internet access, and yet, continues to lag behind.
 Hi, good morning. I know everyone's maybe a little hungover or tired from yesterday, but I appreciate you coming out to hear me speak. My name is Saru Svarvar. I am an Iranian-American journalist. I currently live in Bonn, Germany. I've just written this new book called The Internet of Elsewhere. It's coming out this month. It'll take a little longer to get into Europe because they still have to put it on ships and send it over. I apologize. If you Google it, you'll find my website and you can order it or ask your local books or whatever. Anyway, I work currently at Deutsche Welle in Bonn, Germany, Deutsche Welle English, so your taxes pay for my job. So thank you. And I host this program called Spectrum. It's in English. It's about Germany and European science and technology. You can check it out there. I've also worked for these other radio programs in Canada and in the US. So my book is about The Internet of Elsewhere. What does that mean? That means that the Internet, of course, that some of you are using right now that we all know and love, it's kind of the same, right? When you use the Internet in Germany or whether you use it in this case Mauritania, kind of your experience is the same. So what do I mean by The Internet of Elsewhere? Well, I mean that the things that the Internet produces are different in different parts of the world, right? So there's a reason that various kind of, you could call them applications, you could call them effects emerge in different parts of the world, right? There's a reason why the Internet itself was born in the time and the place in which it happened, which is to say Southern California in the late 1960s. But I feel like we've lost this understanding, this kind of historical context, if you will, of how the Internet is this kind of thing that collides, if you will, with history and context. We recently saw things in Egypt and Tunisia and now Libya as well, other parts of North Africa and the Middle East, where there was this idea that these were Facebook revolutions and that people were using social media and how great is that? And that's changing the face of the Middle East. You know, but of course, I don't know, I guess I'm a little bit more skeptical about that because as some of you may know, Egypt shut down the Internet for five days prior to Mubarak's stepping down from power. And yet the protests got bigger. So to me, that seems a big kind of check against this idea that the Internet as a concept is an actor in these things, right? That in this case it produces democratic change. We've seen this before in Iran, right? Two years ago, you probably know there was this presidential election, it was very controversial. Ahmadinejad won the election and is now the president, again, of Iran. And there was this idea that people were speaking out against the government and using Twitter, using all kinds of social media, and again, really pushing people to the streets. This was this narrative that was created, I think, in the American media. I don't know how much attention it got over here in Europe. But you know, there was this idea that, again, the Internet is this actor that, you know, changes a country and changes a society. But that also applies to situations that aren't political, right? That applies to development. There's this concept that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, which is called ICT4D, ICT4 Development Information and Communications Technology for Development. So there's this idea that, you know, we see it in projects like the One Laptop for Child or there's a non-profit startup in San Francisco called Invinio, and there's all kinds of other projects, where, you know, if only we bring technology, information technology, mobile phone technology, internet technology, Wi-Fi, whatever, to a place, then we create some effect, right? Then we create economic development, right? So again, there's this idea that the Internet or technology or information technology is somehow acting upon that place. And I'm not trying to say that that, you know, it doesn't help. But I guess I don't really, as I've done research for this book, I believe less in this kind of primary kind of acting relationship. But the thing is, we've seen this idea before. This idea is even older than that. Nicholas Negroponte said back in 1995 that, you know, the Internet will flatten organizations, it will harmonize people, the nation-state will go away, but the nation-state, you know, as we all know, is still very much here. And this is an idea that's even older than that, right? With this quote was taken from a book that I highly recommend you guys read. It's called The Victorian Internet, and it's about the rise of the telegraph around the world. And there was this idea back then, too, that the telegraph, you know, is connecting people and harmonizing people, and that's so awesome. And, you know, and again, like, that didn't really happen. And so, you know, this is kind of what we've been reduced to, I feel like, is like when you have the Internet and you bring it to a place, right, either some kind of change happens, some kind of political change happens, some kind of economic change happens, and that's great, you know. And again, I'm not trying to say that it doesn't help, that it doesn't, it's not good for people to have mobile phones and to have internet access, of course it is. But what I'm trying to show is that it's more complicated than that, and I would argue more interesting than that. So, I took a look at my book at four different countries, as he said, South Korea, Estonia, Senegal, and Iran. So, you might ask, well, why these countries, right? And this is the longer part in my book that I explained how, you know, what I'm trying to argue is that when the Internet arrives in a particular place, it collides with what's already there, right? The Internet doesn't arrive in the same point in a country's history in every place, right? Some people are more literate or less literate, more educated or less educated, have more economic power or less, or have more political freedoms or less. And when it arrives at that place at that time, it does something to the character of the Internet and it emerges really interesting ideas and really interesting things. So, I looked at Korea, right? Why Korea? Because Korea is the world's most wired country in the world. I don't know how many people have been to South Korea. Anyone from South Korea? All right, well, a couple of people. So, South Korea is this really wacky place, right? It's got the world's fastest and cheapest and most widespread broadband of anywhere in the world, right? This is according to the OECD. South Korea is also the place that has, and this is what this picture is showing, the world's most developed e-sports league. These are young Koreans playing professional Starcraft, right? These are people who are paid tens of thousands of dollars, in some cases as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars, to do nothing but play Starcraft. There are two television channels in Korea devoted to showing Starcraft. I'm not joking. And you can go, this is in the e-sports stadium in Seoul. And, you know, and so this is what they've done now with their internet, right? This is one of the things that's come out of their history. So I would put Korea at kind of one end of the spectrum. The next country that I wrote about is Senegal, which I would put not on the opposite extreme end of the other spectrum, but I would say somewhere a little bit closer. I would argue that Senegal is one of the world's best least connected countries. What do I mean by that? There are lots of countries in the world that have terrible, terrible situations. Places like Somalia, places like the former Zaire, places especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where there's been a lot of political and economic turmoil over the years. Senegal is a Sub-Saharan African country that is different than some of these other ones. In that, they've had a peaceful transition of power over the last 50 years since they became independent from France. And they're economically stable as well. So they've had political economic stability, that's good. They happen to be well placed to connecting to the undersea data cables that flow down the Atlantic Ocean, down across the western coast of Africa. And yet, so they have all these things that you would think would make the internet work well, would make more people get on the internet and use the internet, and make websites like this, which is called Face Dakar, which is the kind of gawker, if you will, of Senegal. It's a relatively new website. It's kind of a gossip news site, I guess. But it's only used by a really small percentage of the population. And so, you know, my question is, if Senegal is one of the best cases, one of the places in Sub-Saharan Africa where you would think the internet would work, why doesn't it work there? And that's, so Senegal is a little bit on the other side. The other countries are Estonia, which again I would put somewhere slightly less than South Korea, but you know, somewhere toward the middle top region. I obviously didn't write about every country in the world, so I don't know precisely what the rankings are, but you get the idea. Skype came from Estonia, right? And Estonia is this kind of place that I had, anyone, any Estonians in the room? One Estonian, I love you. Anyone been to Estonia? Good, a few people. So, you, those of you who have been to Estonia, you'll know, to me, Estonia is like a geek's paradise, right? There's free Wi-Fi everywhere. They have these really awesome digital ID cards. You can vote on the internet. You can access all kinds of government services on the internet. And of course, Skype, you know, came out of Estonia. And why did Skype come out of Estonia? Right? Why didn't Skype come from Silicon Valley or from Germany or from Australia or from anywhere else, right? Why did Estonia produce all of these kind of cool things? So that's what I'm trying to understand. And then again, somewhere in terms of connectivity, maybe further down, a little less than Estonia, maybe not quite as low as Senegal, is Iran. And Iran unfortunately has the distinction of being the world's first country to arrest a blogger. And they arrested this guy, Mr. Sina Motalibi, who was a journalist and blogger, and he was arrested in 2003. He now lives in London. And as we saw a couple years ago, with respect to people using the internet as a way to fight back against the government, right, there's been this kind of seesawing that's actually been going on a lot longer than 2009. It's been going on for over a decade now in Iran, where the government pushes one way against the internet, and people push back, and so on and so on. So this is a much longer, I think, more interesting story. So we'll take the first one, South Korea. In my book, I read about this guy. His name is Chun Kilnam, and he is a, this is just a little timeline of Korean history, and I think it's important to understand that. But yeah, so this guy's Chun Kilnam, he's now a professor in, he retired from his university in Korea, and now teaches in China and Japan. I didn't know a whole lot about Korean history before I started this. I don't know how many of you know a little bit about Korean history, but one of the things that I think is really important to understand about Korean history in the 20th century is this kind of weird relationship between Japan and Korea. And by weird, I mean, you know, not so good on the Japanese side. Japan annexed the entire Korean Peninsula in 1910, and so Koreans were basically forced to become Japanese. And Korean culture and language was very much suppressed for the beginning of the 20th century. Japan, of course, bombed Pearl Harbor and entered World War II in the 40s. 1943, the Pentagon is dedicated, right? So this is, again, in the kind of World War II period, and you know, Japan is kind of being defeated in the war and stuff. Chun Kilnam was born to a Korean family in Japan in 1943. And actually, he grew up speaking Japanese in Korea, excuse me, he grew up speaking Japanese in Japan even though his family was Korean, and he was ethnically Korean. Again, he was part of this, you know, this idea of kind of Japanizing people, even if they were from other places, especially from Korea. So the war ended in 1945, and eventually, you know, these kind of issues, unresolved issues from the Potsdam conference just down the river didn't resolve what was happening in Korea, right? And so the Soviets and the Allies were, you know, in disagreement over what should happen with Korea. So we've got this Korean War in North and South Korea, okay. So then we get into the 1960s, and there's this guy named General Park Chun-hee who takes power in Korea, he was a general, and he becomes this kind of dictator, but you know, he's an interesting guy because on the one hand, yes, he was a dictator, yes, he was authoritarian, yes, it was not a democratic system. However, he did create this amazing economic development program that continued for decades, kind of what he said in motion. And just kind of a key example of that, I think, which is kind of amazing, is that in 1961, there were 30,000 cars registered in South Korea. 35 years later, that number was up to 10 million. And for those of you who have been to South Korea, you'll know that it's, you know, it just is, I would say, just as developed and modern as anywhere else in the world. So, okay, so now we get to the 60s, right? And Chun-hee studies mathematics in Japan, and then he thinks about maybe going to do graduate work actually at Moscow State University to study mathematics. But during the 1960s, as Korea, there were kind of pro-democratic protests going on in Korea at this time, and he was kind of, he kind of felt this pull toward Korea. He felt kind of alienated in Japan, and even though he didn't speak Korean, and had never actually been to Korea until the 60s when he traveled there with his mother for the very first time, he didn't really know anything about Korea. And, but yet, somehow he felt like he didn't have a future in Japan, and he felt like he was kind of duty bound to help his ancestral home country. And so he thought about, okay, well, what could I do that would be helpful to this country that is undergoing this rapid, rapid development? And he thought, well, maybe I could be a doctor, but it turns out that, you know, hospitals kind of freak him out a little bit. He doesn't like the smells and blood and stuff. So then he thought, okay, mathematics, maybe information science and maybe computer science, because, you know, that would be useful to people as well. And so he looked around at various universities, and he decided to enter UCLA as a graduate student studying computer science in 1966. Now, for those of you who know your internet history, you'll recognize this, right? UCLA in the late 1960s was like the place to be for people working on this obscure thing called the ARPANET, right? And the ARPANET is what is now our internet, right? It started at UCLA in the 1960s as this American government-funded research project. That guy right there is a professor at UCLA, still teaches. His name is Leonard Kleinrock. And what he's standing next to is something called the IMP, which is the world's first router. So all those little, you know, 20-year-old routers that you guys have in your apartments or houses, originally they looked like that, and they cost, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. So, Chonthil Namar arrives at UCLA. He is classmates actually with Vince Surf, who invented TCPIP. TCPIP, of course, is what makes the internet function. So it was really kind of fortuitous that Chonthil Namar was around what was going on at UCLA at the time. And so what happens is Chonthil Namar, he studies, he gets his doctorate, he works and teaches for a little bit in California, but then he gets an offer to come back to Korea. Again, he'd never lived there. And he starts working on what he calls the system development network. This is the 1980s. And he's made a professor at this place called KAIST, which is the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. It used to be in Seoul, the capital. Now it's in Daejeon, which is a city about two hours south of Seoul. And so his idea was this, let's build the internet in Korea, right? And this is the 1980s. This is when the internet is still a relatively new thing. It's this kind of obscure computer science project. There's only a few internet nodes that exist, I think, probably by the 80s. I'm guessing that there was something like on the order of hundreds or thousands of nodes spread around North America, Europe, other parts of the world. And so he said, okay, well, we need to build our own network. And we need to build our own computers and our own stuff. And so he had this idea of making this network to connect. He was basically replicating the ARPANET. And this was kind of his own pet project. And so he, as a professor, he had graduate students. And these graduate students in the 1980s, they became this kind of dream team. And they went on to, and because of his experience in Japan and in the US, and knowing what he wanted to do, he wanted to create something new in Korea that had never been there before, which was to say the internet and technology, he told them, I don't want you to be professors. I don't want you to be academics. I don't want you to do what I did. I want you to be entrepreneurs. I want you to be leaders of industry. I want you to develop this country through the means of technology. And so what he would do is, it was almost like a start-up, right? These students of his, they would wake up at 9, 10 in the morning, they would code, they would hack, they would try to, you know, they were building routers, they were trying to make this stuff work. And then, and they would work till, you know, midnight, 1, 2 in the morning, whatever. But then on the weekend, he would, and this is my favorite part, he would make them go rock climbing. He would make them go hiking. He would make them go skiing. He would, you know, it was very kind of regimented, and he would tell them, he would kind of instill into them this idea of pride and of duty to the country. These were young computer scientists in their early mid-20s. They were exempted from military service. They were given full scholarships. They were just, you know, all the doors were opened for them. And he was saying, look, you guys have to take this seriously, and I will work you, you know, doing stuff during the week, and then you will have to work physically too, because, you know, I want you to be able to not only solve these problems, but to, you know, be healthy so you can work on this project. But so what happened was, so they did build it, they built this network. It did connect to the Internet. I believe it was the first non-U.S. project to, that was kind of independently developed to connect to the Internet. And so, and he got what he wanted, which was that these students of his, they came out of this program doing exactly that. Jin Ho-hoor is a Korean entrepreneur now, and he launched the first private Korean Internet service provider in 1998. The first broadband service was launched in Korea, and the person who was kind of in charge of that part of the company was also one of Chon-Kilnam's students. And through that, because it was so disruptive in the Korean market at that time, there were other companies that came on, and there was major, major price wars, and that was really what developed, what kicked off this kind of high, excuse me, very pervasive broadband across Korea. Also, in 1998, a guy by the name of Jake Song, he wrote a program called Lineage. This was a really, really big MMORPG, massive multiplayer online role-playing game, well before World of Warcraft and all the rest, again, developed by one of his students. And Lineage actually really pushed into the Korean Esports Players Association, that slide that I showed earlier with the guys, that guy in that pod playing StarCraft, right? This is this group that does this, Caspa. And so they, you know, it really kind of snowballed into that direction. And so, you know, I think that this is, again, this is a, if you want to kind of, a lot more details, there's more stuff in my book. But, you know, I would say that this combination of high levels of education, of nationalism, of duty, of pride, of these kinds of things really kind of pushed Korea into this direction. And they viewed the Internet as a means to getting to development. Obviously, they did a lot of other stuff too. And by 2007, they had hit 90% broadband penetration. I don't think that my home country of the United States has that high of broadband penetration. So let's move on to Senegal. And, okay, so in Senegal, I write about this guy, Amadou Tup. He is now also an entrepreneur and developer and kind of activist guy in Senegal. While I was researching Senegal, and I actually lived in Senegal as a student for about half a year in 2002, 2003, 1946, IBM actually shows up in French colonial Senegal. And they were hired to build kind of the IT systems or the kind of proto IT systems of the Senegalese National Railway and a few other kind of big government projects. And they thought that they could make money just like they had in other French colonies, like in French Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia, those kinds of areas, Morocco, other places like that. And this was kind of the, I guess, early kind of IT environment that Amadou Tup was born in. He grew up as a kid under colonial Senegal, of course, occupied by France. And then Senegal became independent in 1960. By the later, by the end of the 60s, he won a logic and mathematics competition that was held by IBM. He later went on to work at IBM. And they, you know, he kind of rose through the ranks of IBM. He lived in France for a little while and, you know, really benefited from being exposed to various types of technology and development and things like that. By 1985, he had left IBM and he started his own company in Senegal. And then he attended CES for the first time. And 1995 was, I probably, I would guess, maybe some of the more geeky, hackery people in the room probably were using the Internet earlier or the web at least, or a little earlier. But I know for myself, you know, that was around the time when I first got exposed to the Internet and to the web. And Amadou Tup was the same thing. He saw an early demo version of Netscape while he was at CES in Las Vegas. And he just thought, man, like, this is really cool. We've got pictures, we've got text, we've got all this stuff. That would be great for Senegal. But, you know, he was worried about it being expensive and stuff like that, which is definitely an issue in Sub-Saharan Africa. But, you know, the kind of seed was planted in his head. And he went on to really encourage the government and he kind of ingratiated himself to various government officials and really tried to push the government to use more websites and for people to use the Internet in a better way. One of the issues that also happens in Senegal, or not just in Senegal, but in Sub-Saharan Africa is this idea of demonopolization and privatization of the telecom. So Germany, I think, went through this in the 80s with Deutsche Telekom and it's private now. The US had the same thing with AT&T, France Telecom, other big telecoms around the world. In Senegal, the telecom company, the incumbent monopoly, is this company called Sonetel. And they privatized in 1995. However, France Telecom bought 42% of the company. And a lot of people, including Abadutup, were very upset about this because they felt that it kind of reeked of colonialism. And it wasn't very kind of democratic in the way that they did it, but whatever. By 1998, Abadutup advised the government to put on election rolls in the Senegalese presidential elections. So what that means is people weren't sure kind of who was eligible to vote and who had been officially registered. And this general had been put in charge of this project and the general CSE went to Abadutup and he said, you know, what can we do? How can we make people trust that they're actually registered to vote? And he said, well, just put them on the internet. And so he did and people did that. There was little problems. He had some personal information up there that people probably shouldn't have access to, their mother's first names, which can be used as a personal identifier in Senegal. But it was a neat idea. Even though at that time, 1998, very, very, very few people in Senegal had access to the internet. But it was starting to come. And the government was buying into this as well. And there were all kinds of projects. And this is kind of what I'm talking about, is that there were a number of projects both from within Senegal and kind of coming from other places that kind of started and then kind of fell apart. One of the first ones was this program by the Senegalese singer, Yusuf Endur. Any Yusuf Endur fans out there? Anyone? A couple? All right. So he's this famous Senegalese singer, very cool guy. He, you know, plays in Europe and Senegal, of course, and all kinds of stuff. He's like a UNESCO, UN, like cultural ambassador or something, very charismatic guy. And he had this idea of founding these Joko Clubs. And Joko is a wall-off word. It's a local language in Senegal and it means connection or link. And the idea was to build kind of cyber centers, cyber clubs, community centers, places where people could go, kids could go and use the internet and stuff. And HP Hewlett Packard was involved and they were putting up all kinds of money. He gave it, there was a big speech about it, I believe at Davos during this time and, you know, everybody was really excited. But it kind of fell apart because it relied on a big American company or a big company to keep bankrolling this project. And the project fell apart by 2002. By 2003, the American government got involved and they had something called the Digital Freedom Initiative. Anyone heard of the Digital Freedom Initiative? Anyone? No? All right. One person. Okay. So this was a project that was started by the American government under the Bush administration. The idea was to bring better internet access, better connectivity to various places around the world and to teach entrepreneurs and people, again, as a development project. And the first country they picked was Senegal. And so there were all kinds of committees. There were American and Senegalese advisors that were trying to figure out how to make the internet work better in Senegal. They established a cybercafe in the middle of one of the biggest markets in downtown Dakar. But again, the project was funded for three years. It kind of fell apart after two years. That cybercafe that they built is still there. At least it was when I was last in Senegal four years ago. And it feels like every other cybercafe. And this was also around the same time when lots and lots of private cybercafes were opening up all over Senegal. So it didn't, again, that one didn't really go anywhere. I mentioned earlier, I just wanted to show this is a cable map of Africa. And so for those of you who may not know where Senegal is, it's, if you can see on the map there, there's the westernmost point in the north where that little text on purple and orange, Senegal is just north of that because that's Capol Verde. So Senegal is kind of the westernmost point in Africa. And like I said, Senegal is geographically well placed. You can see these massive data cables running down the coast of Africa. And their landing stations are in Senegal. And actually the countries, the landlocked countries that are next to Senegal, like Mali and some of these other places, actually have to rely on data access from Senegal because of the cables. And I actually just saw a tweet this morning that Nigeria, I think it's Nigeria, since some of these newer cables that you can see there in the diagram, like the orange and the purple ones, Nigeria internet traffic is up like 400% since one of these new cables was turned on. And as you can see, East Africa is really deficient in terms of connectivity as well. Anyway. So Digital Freedom Initiative didn't really go anywhere. By December 2003, the president of Senegal, this guy, Abdul-Iwad, had his own idea, which was to create something called Digital Solidarity. Anyone heard of this? The Digital Solidarity Fund? No? Okay. So yeah, so this was this idea. He proposed it in the WSIS conference, the World Summit on the Information Society that was in Geneva. And he said that, you know, look, part of the reason why Senegalese people and other people in the developing world don't have access to the internet or don't have as much access as we would like is that stuff is too expensive, right? So what I want to do is I want to make, I want to create a program where people at the point of sale in, let's say, Berlin, you walk into a shop, you're like, hi, I want to buy a laptop, it's 1,000 euros. Would you like to donate 10 euros to this Digital Solidarity Fund that would then go to people in other countries? This didn't go anywhere at all. They created a foundation in France and another one in Switzerland and this didn't, also didn't go anywhere. In the meantime, Sonatelle is raking in the cash. I'm pretty sure Sonatelle is the most profitable country, or most profitable company in Senegal. In 2007, they had a profit of $310 million. Pretty good. And still, you know, Senegalese internet penetration remains kind of low and this is what I say when Senegal might be, there are probably some other ones that would fit this category as well, might be one of the best least connected countries and that's what I'm saying is that, and I think part of it has to do with education, part of it has to do with level of economic activity. Only 40% of Senegalese people can even read, so already 60% of people can't use the internet because they can't read. So yeah, so that's the story of Senegal, this is the In-Nut Show. Moving on to Estonia, one of my favorite places. I am really obsessed with Estonia. I could talk for hours about, just about Estonia. I had never been to Estonia, I'd barely heard of Estonia until about six years ago when I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor that said that Estonia had declared internet access as a human right and that just blew my mind and I started reading up on Estonia and I discovered that Skype had come from there and all this kind of stuff and that was pretty amazing. Again, a little bit of history. The Nazis, so Estonia, I didn't know as I was reading about it, Estonia, for those of you who may not know, Estonia is way up in the north of Europe, not that far from here, up by Helsinki in Russia and they were invaded over the last thousand years by basically all of their neighboring countries at various points. The Baltic Germans were very active in the 19th century in Estonia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, all kinds of other countries came and went in Estonia. By the 1940s the Nazis were up in there hanging out for a couple of years. Then the Soviets came in, right? And the Soviets, they said, okay, Estonia, we don't want you to learn about liberal arts and social sciences and stuff. We want you to be technological, we want you to be scientific. So what did they do? They established in 1960 the Institute for Cybernetics and they established it right in Tallinn, Estonia and they were doing exactly what it sounds like, cybernetic research and stuff like that, which I think is pretty cool. In 1967, this guy, Velio Hammer, was born. For those of you who've been to Estonia, you'll know, as I said, there's free Wi-Fi all over the place, you can thank this guy for doing that. Velio Hammer has become this kind of Wi-Fi evangelist just kind of preaching how great free Wi-Fi is. And so as a result, there's free Wi-Fi in the airport, in the port, in the bus station, in farmhouses, in all kinds of places all over the country. Estonia became independent, of course, at the end of the Soviet period, 1991, and Estonia kind of woke up as best as I can tell and kind of rebooted itself, if you will. And so there were all these ideas coming around and one of them was this Tiger League project or Tigri-Hupa in Estonian. And the idea was, let's wire the entire country, let's put the internet access in every school in all of Estonia. Estonia is not that big of a country, 1.3 million people. As somebody said earlier, I think that's the size of, you know, a decent size German city. In American terms, that would be like San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley put together. Anyway, so they, you know, they went on this ambitious project and they connected all the schools and they spent a lot of money and they, you know, and there was this idea that, again, that we can kind of leap forward into the future. There were other ideas too, like the Digital Signatures Act and the Digital ID Card Act that created these digital ID cards. E-Parliament, the system where if you were, so the Estonian government, as best as I understand it, they have a cabinet of ministers and they propose bills on anything, you know, transport, defense, economics, whatever, and they discuss it and then once they agree, then that bill gets sent to the Estonian Parliament and then they vote on it and it becomes law. But so they said, well, it's stupid that we're printing out all these bills and you've got all these stacks of paper, so why don't we do this online, right? So if you go to Tallinn, you'll see there's this kind of online interface and they said, okay, we're going to put all the bills online and if the ministers don't discuss them online before the physical in-person meeting, then the bill passes, right? The idea was that if it's not worth discussing online, it's not worth discussing in-person, so let's just streamline this process. And so that's what they did. Wi-Fi EE was established. This is Velio's website and he catalogs all of the Wi-Fi hotspots all over the place. 2003, the first Skype prototype was born and it was actually created, the very first Skype offices, they now have their own offices, but I find it interesting that their very first offices were actually in the Institute of Cybernetics. This is what some of these Wi-Fi hotspots look like. That's actually in a public park, but that logo, that Wi-Fi EE logo, you see it, it's very common. You see it just like you would see on a restaurant, you know, Visa Mastercard, Eurocard, whatever bank card, you know, for at a bar or a restaurant or something, and then you'll see a little Wi-Fi sticker. And that's what the Estonian ID cards look like. Again, they're about the size of a European bank card and they've got little chip, and so what you do is you plug that into a USB card reader, you go onto a citizen's portal and you have access to all kinds of government services ranging from, you know, paying your parking tickets or your speeding tickets or checking your university admissions or paying your taxes or voting in national elections. And that's pretty cool. And then I wanted to throw the Skype thing up there because, you know, Skype is from Estonia too, and when you get to Tallinn Airport, this splash page of Skype comes up and says that, you know, Skype is sponsoring the Wi-Fi there. Anyway. So yeah, and then Estonia kind of progressed in this way as well, and I guess you could say the really, I think, kind of one of the moments that Skype kind of arrived onto the world stage or kind of, you know, yeah, this kind of landmark moment was when President Bush received as a gift a Skype phone from Estonian Prime Minister Anders Ansip when President Bush was visiting Estonia in 2006. By 2007, Estonia had started this program of online voting. Again, using these digital ID cards, there's digital signatures and encryptions and all this kind of stuff. People, I'm sure anyone who's read anything about Estonia, oftentimes, at least in the American press, they call it Estonia now. In 2007, you might have heard there was a little bit of a cyber skirmish, cyber attack, cyber war. It's very scary. There was a statue of a Soviet soldier in Tallinn that was in a park, and the Estonian government had decided to move it to a different park outside of town. A lot of Russians still living in Estonia got very upset. As a result, a lot of Estonian websites got attacked as a form of political protest. There were Russian language websites, not like kind of traditional underground hacking kind of websites, but I think we saw kind of a similar thing with Anonymous where people kind of made it very easy. It was just like, okay, follow these steps, and you too can join the cyber attacks against Estonia because they moved our statue. So government websites were hit. These were DDoS attacks. These were kind of hacktivist, like defacing, you know, putting up false statements on the prime minister's website and stuff. It wasn't very kind of threatening. I don't think. The Estonians investigated. They tried to figure out who did this. Of course, everybody in Estonia pretty much believes that the Russian governments either implicitly or explicitly was behind it. Only one guy was ever actually not even convicted. He pled guilty. This guy, Dmitry Galdyshevich, he is an ethnic Russian but Estonian citizen living in Estonia. He admitted guilt as to participating in these attacks and he was fined $1,700 and didn't serve any jail time. And the Estonians basically felt frustrated because their Russian counterparts would not give them access to any kind of data or records and stuff. As a result of these cyber attacks, the cooperative cyber defense center of excellence, logos up there in the top, was established in Tallinn in 2008. This is part of NATO. This is a research center that is devoted to cyber defense and cyber security that they created in the wake of these attacks. And in fact, Estonia had actually proposed this idea way back in 2003. But, you know, NATO was like, oh, cyber attacks, it will never happen. And then it did and then they got their center. And one of the other cool things is that in 2011, this year, you can now use your mobile phone to authenticate yourself for online voting. So you can register and you get a special SIM card with some special encryption on it and put it in your phone. And so instead of having to put your ID card into your computer or into a card reader to authenticate your identity when you want to vote, you can now do it by cell phone. You can't vote over your phone, but you can authenticate. Anyway, last country, Iran. I wrote about this guy, Omid Mehmatian. He's an Iranian journalist and blogger. He now lives in San Francisco. He has become part of a group of people, including my own father, who are basically permanent exiles from Iran. Germany has a large Iranian community as well. And Iran actually has a really interesting history when it comes to the internet. I think Iran has one of the highest internet penetration rates in all of the Middle East. It's something like 33, 35 percent give or take. And Iran has been on the internet for a pretty long time, actually. Way back in 1993, Iran was able to connect to the internet through Austria, through an academic network called CSNet. And it kind of slowly grew, again, similar story to some of these other places that I mentioned. By 1995, there was 30,000 people online. By 2000, there was a million Iranians online. By 2008, that number jumped to, I think, like 20, I think, tens of millions, 20 million, something like that. Big number. Again, you know, it's important to understand the history and the politics, I think, because as I said, this is about kind of what kind of emerges out of these countries. By 1997, a guy by the name of Mohammed Khatami was elected president. He was the president before the current president, Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005. Khatami was president from 1987 to 2005. He was viewed as a moderate, as somewhat of a reformer, as he had spent some time in Europe, actually, in Germany. And he really pushed for some reforms within the Islamic system. He opened up media. He allowed newspapers to open. He allowed civil society to kind of open up. He allowed for nonprofits, non-governmental organizations to open up. There was a moment, there was a few years where there was kind of a moment of opening up a little bit of Iranian society. Of course, you know, there were certain, what they call red lines, that you couldn't cross, right? You couldn't say anything bad about the Islamic Republic. You couldn't say anything bad about the Supreme Leader. I told the whole, hominy, and so forth. And by 2000, as, you know, more and more Iranians are getting online, we have the first instance of the government pushing back against what's happening on the Iranian internet. There was this guy called Ayatollah Monteseri. He was a reformer, reformist Ayatollah against the government. He had formally been really kind of part of Iranian government, he had been closely associated with Aitolahomini, the supreme leader, the leader of the Islamic revolution. But during the 1980s, he kind of fell out of favor. He disagreed with some of the brutal policies that the government imposed during the Iranian Iraq War, during the 1980s. So he was basically under house arrest for the rest of his life, from the 1980s until when he passed away just a couple of years ago. In 2000, he posted a memoir on his website, Monteseri with an i.com, and he posted this memoir and he described what he had done and what he had seen in his relationships with the government and said all kinds of bad things that the government didn't want to get out. And so what did they do? They started their own website. They started Monteseri with a y.com. So they cyber-squatted him, kind of. And they were trying to fool people into going to the wrong website and it didn't really work. But I think that that's kind of interesting, that they cared enough to create a fake webpage to fool people from reading this guy's stuff. By fall 2001, as blogs were starting to come about in the US and in Europe, the first Iranian blogs were coming out too. And I don't know if this is still true, but there was a period when Persian was like the number three or number four language amongst blogs in the world, which is kind of surprising given that it's a relatively small language with respect to the whole world. And there was this guy called Hossein Dirakshan, also known as Hodor, who published a guide in Persian, teaching Persians how to blog in their own language. Hodor.com started supporting Unicode as a way to make it easier for people to get online. Various people were arrested and Sina Muatalebi, the first guy to be arrested, was arrested as he had published some articles that were saying some bad things about the government as well. He was a journalist and he was talking about how that there were things that the government wasn't doing enough to fight, for example, unemployment, which is a big issue, and other things like that, and he was arrested. And there was a whole series of people, including Omeed, who I profile in my book, the guy who was pictured who were arrested at the end of 2004. So for all of you bloggers and Twitterers in the room, which I think is probably most of you, you are in company with President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Aitol Hamani. They're both blogging and Twittering. Aitol Hamani has a Twitter account here. You can go follow him. He tweets in Persian and English. I don't know how good your Persian is, but you can read his stuff there. So yeah, this was a sign that came up during some of the protests from 2009, which I really like, which is, you know, God is with us. Are you filtering him too? Of course, the internet in Iran is filtered and censored and blocked and stuff like that. And I'll just move quickly through this so I can finish up and get time for questions. As you know, and I talked a little bit about this earlier, there was this movement to, you know, there were a whole bunch of series of protests. Twitter and Facebook where people were pushing out videos and things like that. The government was also pushing back. I was having conversations with some people earlier about there was this website, geardob.ir, which used these photos. And I don't know if you can see, there's little red circles around people's faces. And on that webpage, the government is basically asking people to identify protesters. Yeah. Recently, they had this blogging competition that was only open to pro-regime blogs, so that was interesting. And I guess, you know, people have been asking me, like, oh, do you think Iran is different than Egypt and Tunisia and what's going on? And I guess for me, like, my kind of gut feeling is that it is really different. You know, one of the main reasons that I don't like the term Twitter revolution is because revolution implies that things have dramatically changed, but nothing has dramatically changed politically speaking in Iran. The government is still there. You know, things are going on. Yeah, there's, you know, a little bit of protests and stuff. But I think one of the major differences, you know, is that the Iranian government has shown that it's been willing to use, you know, force, right? It sends out armies of guys on motorcycles with clubs and beats people up, right? And what's different about that in Egypt is that the Egyptian government, you know, even with all of the people coming to Tahrir Square and all this kind of stuff, you know, the Egyptian army didn't fire on people. And I think that's a really big difference, you know, same with Tunisia, right? There wasn't that same kind of use of physical violence against people. So I think that that's something that, again, we often lose sight of. Anyway, I'm done. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
 Hi, good morning. I know everyone's maybe a little hungover or tired from yesterday,  but I appreciate you coming out to hear me speak. My name is Saru Svarvar. I am an  Iranian-American journalist. I currently live in Bonn, Germany. I've just written this new  book called The Internet of Elsewhere. It's coming out this month. It'll take a little  longer to get into Europe because they still have to put it on ships and send it over.  I apologize. If you Google it, you'll find my website and you can order it or ask your  local books or whatever. Anyway, I work currently at Deutsche Welle in Bonn, Germany, Deutsche  Welle English, so your taxes pay for my job. So thank you. And I host this program called  Spectrum. It's in English. It's about Germany and European science and technology. You can  check it out there. I've also worked for these other radio programs in Canada and in the US.  So my book is about The Internet of Elsewhere. What does that mean? That means that the Internet,  of course, that some of you are using right now that we all know and love, it's kind of  the same, right? When you use the Internet in Germany or whether you use it in this  case Mauritania, kind of your experience is the same. So what do I mean by The Internet  of Elsewhere? Well, I mean that the things that the Internet produces are different in  different parts of the world, right? So there's a reason that various kind of, you could call  them applications, you could call them effects emerge in different parts of the world, right?  There's a reason why the Internet itself was born in the time and the place in which it  happened, which is to say Southern California in the late 1960s. But I feel like we've lost  this understanding, this kind of historical context, if you will, of how the Internet  is this kind of thing that collides, if you will, with history and context. We recently  saw things in Egypt and Tunisia and now Libya as well, other parts of North Africa and the  Middle East, where there was this idea that these were Facebook revolutions and that people  were using social media and how great is that? And that's changing the face of the Middle  East. You know, but of course, I don't know, I guess I'm a little bit more skeptical about  that because as some of you may know, Egypt shut down the Internet for five days prior  to Mubarak's stepping down from power. And yet the protests got bigger. So to me, that  seems a big kind of check against this idea that the Internet as a concept is an actor  in these things, right? That in this case it produces democratic change. We've seen  this before in Iran, right? Two years ago, you probably know there was this presidential  election, it was very controversial. Ahmadinejad won the election and is now the president,  again, of Iran. And there was this idea that people were speaking out against the government  and using Twitter, using all kinds of social media, and again, really pushing people to  the streets. This was this narrative that was created, I think, in the American media.  I don't know how much attention it got over here in Europe. But you know, there was this  idea that, again, the Internet is this actor that, you know, changes a country and changes  a society. But that also applies to situations that aren't political, right? That applies  to development. There's this concept that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, which  is called ICT4D, ICT4 Development Information and Communications Technology for Development.  So there's this idea that, you know, we see it in projects like the One Laptop for Child  or there's a non-profit startup in San Francisco called Invinio, and there's all kinds of other  projects, where, you know, if only we bring technology, information technology, mobile  phone technology, internet technology, Wi-Fi, whatever, to a place, then we create some  effect, right? Then we create economic development, right? So again, there's this idea that the  Internet or technology or information technology is somehow acting upon that place. And I'm  not trying to say that that, you know, it doesn't help. But I guess I don't really,  as I've done research for this book, I believe less in this kind of primary kind of acting  relationship. But the thing is, we've seen this idea before. This idea is even older  than that. Nicholas Negroponte said back in 1995 that, you know, the Internet will flatten  organizations, it will harmonize people, the nation-state will go away, but the nation-state,  you know, as we all know, is still very much here. And this is an idea that's even older  than that, right? With this quote was taken from a book that I highly recommend you guys  read. It's called The Victorian Internet, and it's about the rise of the telegraph around  the world. And there was this idea back then, too, that the telegraph, you know, is connecting  people and harmonizing people, and that's so awesome. And, you know, and again, like,  that didn't really happen. And so, you know, this is kind of what we've been reduced to,  I feel like, is like when you have the Internet and you bring it to a place, right, either  some kind of change happens, some kind of political change happens, some kind of economic  change happens, and that's great, you know. And again, I'm not trying to say that it doesn't  help, that it doesn't, it's not good for people to have mobile phones and to have internet  access, of course it is. But what I'm trying to show is that it's more complicated than  that, and I would argue more interesting than that. So, I took a look at my book at four  different countries, as he said, South Korea, Estonia, Senegal, and Iran. So, you might  ask, well, why these countries, right? And this is the longer part in my book that I  explained how, you know, what I'm trying to argue is that when the Internet arrives in  a particular place, it collides with what's already there, right? The Internet doesn't  arrive in the same point in a country's history in every place, right? Some people are more  literate or less literate, more educated or less educated, have more economic power or  less, or have more political freedoms or less. And when it arrives at that place at that  time, it does something to the character of the Internet and it emerges really interesting  ideas and really interesting things. So, I looked at Korea, right? Why Korea? Because  Korea is the world's most wired country in the world. I don't know how many people have  been to South Korea. Anyone from South Korea? All right, well, a couple of people. So, South  Korea is this really wacky place, right? It's got the world's fastest and cheapest and most  widespread broadband of anywhere in the world, right? This is according to the OECD. South  Korea is also the place that has, and this is what this picture is showing, the world's  most developed e-sports league. These are young Koreans playing professional Starcraft,  right? These are people who are paid tens of thousands of dollars, in some cases as high  as hundreds of thousands of dollars, to do nothing but play Starcraft. There are two  television channels in Korea devoted to showing Starcraft. I'm not joking. And you can go,  this is in the e-sports stadium in Seoul. And, you know, and so this is what they've done  now with their internet, right? This is one of the things that's come out of their history.  So I would put Korea at kind of one end of the spectrum. The next country that I wrote  about is Senegal, which I would put not on the opposite extreme end of the other spectrum,  but I would say somewhere a little bit closer. I would argue that Senegal is one of the world's  best least connected countries. What do I mean by that? There are lots of countries  in the world that have terrible, terrible situations. Places like Somalia, places like  the former Zaire, places especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where there's been a lot of political  and economic turmoil over the years. Senegal is a Sub-Saharan African country that is different  than some of these other ones. In that, they've had a peaceful transition of power over the  last 50 years since they became independent from France. And they're economically stable  as well. So they've had political economic stability, that's good. They happen to be  well placed to connecting to the undersea data cables that flow down the Atlantic Ocean,  down across the western coast of Africa. And yet, so they have all these things that you  would think would make the internet work well, would make more people get on the internet  and use the internet, and make websites like this, which is called Face Dakar, which is  the kind of gawker, if you will, of Senegal. It's a relatively new website. It's kind  of a gossip news site, I guess. But it's only used by a really small percentage of the population.  And so, you know, my question is, if Senegal is one of the best cases, one of the places  in Sub-Saharan Africa where you would think the internet would work, why doesn't it work  there? And that's, so Senegal is a little bit on the other side. The other countries  are Estonia, which again I would put somewhere slightly less than South Korea, but you know,  somewhere toward the middle top region. I obviously didn't write about every country  in the world, so I don't know precisely what the rankings are, but you get the idea. Skype  came from Estonia, right? And Estonia is this kind of place that I had, anyone, any Estonians  in the room? One Estonian, I love you. Anyone been to Estonia? Good, a few people. So, you,  those of you who have been to Estonia, you'll know, to me, Estonia is like a geek's paradise,  right? There's free Wi-Fi everywhere. They have these really awesome digital ID cards.  You can vote on the internet. You can access all kinds of government services on the internet.  And of course, Skype, you know, came out of Estonia. And why did Skype come out of Estonia?  Right? Why didn't Skype come from Silicon Valley or from Germany or from Australia or  from anywhere else, right? Why did Estonia produce all of these kind of cool things?  So that's what I'm trying to understand. And then again, somewhere in terms of connectivity,  maybe further down, a little less than Estonia, maybe not quite as low as Senegal, is Iran.  And Iran unfortunately has the distinction of being the world's first country to arrest  a blogger. And they arrested this guy, Mr. Sina Motalibi, who was a journalist and blogger,  and he was arrested in 2003. He now lives in London. And as we saw a couple years ago,  with respect to people using the internet as a way to fight back against the government,  right, there's been this kind of seesawing that's actually been going on a lot longer  than 2009. It's been going on for over a decade now in Iran, where the government pushes one  way against the internet, and people push back, and so on and so on. So this is a much longer,  I think, more interesting story. So we'll take the first one, South Korea. In my book,  I read about this guy. His name is Chun Kilnam, and he is a, this is just a little timeline  of Korean history, and I think it's important to understand that. But yeah, so this guy's  Chun Kilnam, he's now a professor in, he retired from his university in Korea, and now teaches  in China and Japan. I didn't know a whole lot about Korean history before I started  this. I don't know how many of you know a little bit about Korean history, but one of  the things that I think is really important to understand about Korean history in the  20th century is this kind of weird relationship between Japan and Korea. And by weird, I mean,  you know, not so good on the Japanese side. Japan annexed the entire Korean Peninsula  in 1910, and so Koreans were basically forced to become Japanese. And Korean culture and  language was very much suppressed for the beginning of the 20th century. Japan, of course,  bombed Pearl Harbor and entered World War II in the 40s. 1943, the Pentagon is dedicated,  right? So this is, again, in the kind of World War II period, and you know, Japan is kind  of being defeated in the war and stuff. Chun Kilnam was born to a Korean family in Japan  in 1943. And actually, he grew up speaking Japanese in Korea, excuse me, he grew up speaking  Japanese in Japan even though his family was Korean, and he was ethnically Korean. Again,  he was part of this, you know, this idea of kind of Japanizing people, even if they were  from other places, especially from Korea. So the war ended in 1945, and eventually, you  know, these kind of issues, unresolved issues from the Potsdam conference just down the  river didn't resolve what was happening in Korea, right? And so the Soviets and the Allies  were, you know, in disagreement over what should happen with Korea. So we've got this  Korean War in North and South Korea, okay. So then we get into the 1960s, and there's  this guy named General Park Chun-hee who takes power in Korea, he was a general, and he becomes  this kind of dictator, but you know, he's an interesting guy because on the one hand,  yes, he was a dictator, yes, he was authoritarian, yes, it was not a democratic system. However,  he did create this amazing economic development program that continued for decades, kind of  what he said in motion. And just kind of a key example of that, I think, which is kind  of amazing, is that in 1961, there were 30,000 cars registered in South Korea. 35 years  later, that number was up to 10 million. And for those of you who have been to South Korea,  you'll know that it's, you know, it just is, I would say, just as developed and modern as  anywhere else in the world. So, okay, so now we get to the 60s, right? And Chun-hee  studies mathematics in Japan, and then he thinks about maybe going to do graduate work  actually at Moscow State University to study mathematics. But during the 1960s, as Korea,  there were kind of pro-democratic protests going on in Korea at this time, and he was  kind of, he kind of felt this pull toward Korea. He felt kind of alienated in Japan,  and even though he didn't speak Korean, and had never actually been to Korea until the  60s when he traveled there with his mother for the very first time, he didn't really  know anything about Korea. And, but yet, somehow he felt like he didn't have a future in Japan,  and he felt like he was kind of duty bound to help his ancestral home country. And so  he thought about, okay, well, what could I do that would be helpful to this country that  is undergoing this rapid, rapid development? And he thought, well, maybe I could be a doctor,  but it turns out that, you know, hospitals kind of freak him out a little bit. He doesn't  like the smells and blood and stuff. So then he thought, okay, mathematics, maybe information  science and maybe computer science, because, you know, that would be useful to people as  well. And so he looked around at various universities, and he decided to enter UCLA as a graduate  student studying computer science in 1966. Now, for those of you who know your internet  history, you'll recognize this, right? UCLA in the late 1960s was like the place to be  for people working on this obscure thing called the ARPANET, right? And the ARPANET is what  is now our internet, right? It started at UCLA in the 1960s as this American government-funded  research project. That guy right there is a professor at UCLA, still teaches. His name  is Leonard Kleinrock. And what he's standing next to is something called the IMP, which  is the world's first router. So all those little, you know, 20-year-old routers that  you guys have in your apartments or houses, originally they looked like that, and they  cost, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. So, Chonthil Namar arrives at UCLA. He is  classmates actually with Vince Surf, who invented TCPIP. TCPIP, of course, is what makes the  internet function. So it was really kind of fortuitous that Chonthil Namar was around  what was going on at UCLA at the time. And so what happens is Chonthil Namar, he studies,  he gets his doctorate, he works and teaches for a little bit in California, but then he  gets an offer to come back to Korea. Again, he'd never lived there. And he starts working  on what he calls the system development network. This is the 1980s. And he's made a professor  at this place called KAIST, which is the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.  It used to be in Seoul, the capital. Now it's in Daejeon, which is a city about two hours  south of Seoul. And so his idea was this, let's build the internet in Korea, right? And this  is the 1980s. This is when the internet is still a relatively new thing. It's this kind  of obscure computer science project. There's only a few internet nodes that exist, I think,  probably by the 80s. I'm guessing that there was something like on the order of hundreds  or thousands of nodes spread around North America, Europe, other parts of the world.  And so he said, okay, well, we need to build our own network. And we need to build our  own computers and our own stuff. And so he had this idea of making this network to connect.  He was basically replicating the ARPANET. And this was kind of his own pet project.  And so he, as a professor, he had graduate students. And these graduate students in the  1980s, they became this kind of dream team. And they went on to, and because of his experience  in Japan and in the US, and knowing what he wanted to do, he wanted to create something  new in Korea that had never been there before, which was to say the internet and technology,  he told them, I don't want you to be professors. I don't want you to be academics. I don't  want you to do what I did. I want you to be entrepreneurs. I want you to be leaders of  industry. I want you to develop this country through the means of technology. And so what  he would do is, it was almost like a start-up, right? These students of his, they would wake  up at 9, 10 in the morning, they would code, they would hack, they would try to, you know,  they were building routers, they were trying to make this stuff work. And then, and they  would work till, you know, midnight, 1, 2 in the morning, whatever. But then on the weekend,  he would, and this is my favorite part, he would make them go rock climbing. He would  make them go hiking. He would make them go skiing. He would, you know, it was very kind  of regimented, and he would tell them, he would kind of instill into them this idea  of pride and of duty to the country. These were young computer scientists in their early  mid-20s. They were exempted from military service. They were given full scholarships.  They were just, you know, all the doors were opened for them. And he was saying, look, you  guys have to take this seriously, and I will work you, you know, doing stuff during the  week, and then you will have to work physically too, because, you know, I want you to be able  to not only solve these problems, but to, you know, be healthy so you can work on this  project. But so what happened was, so they did build it, they built this network. It  did connect to the Internet. I believe it was the first non-U.S. project to, that was  kind of independently developed to connect to the Internet. And so, and he got what he  wanted, which was that these students of his, they came out of this program doing exactly  that. Jin Ho-hoor is a Korean entrepreneur now, and he launched the first private Korean  Internet service provider in 1998. The first broadband service was launched in Korea, and  the person who was kind of in charge of that part of the company was also one of Chon-Kilnam's  students. And through that, because it was so disruptive in the Korean market at that  time, there were other companies that came on, and there was major, major price wars,  and that was really what developed, what kicked off this kind of high, excuse me, very pervasive  broadband across Korea. Also, in 1998, a guy by the name of Jake Song, he wrote a program  called Lineage. This was a really, really big MMORPG, massive multiplayer online role-playing  game, well before World of Warcraft and all the rest, again, developed by one of his students.  And Lineage actually really pushed into the Korean Esports Players Association, that slide  that I showed earlier with the guys, that guy in that pod playing StarCraft, right? This  is this group that does this, Caspa. And so they, you know, it really kind of snowballed  into that direction. And so, you know, I think that this is, again, this is a, if you want  to kind of, a lot more details, there's more stuff in my book. But, you know, I would say  that this combination of high levels of education, of nationalism, of duty, of pride, of these  kinds of things really kind of pushed Korea into this direction. And they viewed the Internet  as a means to getting to development. Obviously, they did a lot of other stuff too. And by  2007, they had hit 90% broadband penetration. I don't think that my home country of the United  States has that high of broadband penetration. So let's move on to Senegal. And, okay, so  in Senegal, I write about this guy, Amadou Tup. He is now also an entrepreneur and developer  and kind of activist guy in Senegal. While I was researching Senegal, and I actually  lived in Senegal as a student for about half a year in 2002, 2003, 1946, IBM actually shows  up in French colonial Senegal. And they were hired to build kind of the IT systems or the  kind of proto IT systems of the Senegalese National Railway and a few other kind of  big government projects. And they thought that they could make money just like they  had in other French colonies, like in French Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia, those kinds  of areas, Morocco, other places like that. And this was kind of the, I guess, early kind  of IT environment that Amadou Tup was born in. He grew up as a kid under colonial Senegal,  of course, occupied by France. And then Senegal became independent in 1960. By the later,  by the end of the 60s, he won a logic and mathematics competition that was held by IBM. He later  went on to work at IBM. And they, you know, he kind of rose through the ranks of IBM.  He lived in France for a little while and, you know, really benefited from being exposed  to various types of technology and development and things like that. By 1985, he had left  IBM and he started his own company in Senegal. And then he attended CES for the first time.  And 1995 was, I probably, I would guess, maybe some of the more geeky, hackery people  in the room probably were using the Internet earlier or the web at least, or a little earlier.  But I know for myself, you know, that was around the time when I first got exposed to  the Internet and to the web. And Amadou Tup was the same thing. He saw an early demo version  of Netscape while he was at CES in Las Vegas. And he just thought, man, like, this is really  cool. We've got pictures, we've got text, we've got all this stuff. That would be great  for Senegal. But, you know, he was worried about it being expensive and stuff like that,  which is definitely an issue in Sub-Saharan Africa. But, you know, the kind of seed was  planted in his head. And he went on to really encourage the government and he kind of ingratiated  himself to various government officials and really tried to push the government to use  more websites and for people to use the Internet in a better way.  One of the issues that also happens in Senegal, or not just in Senegal, but in Sub-Saharan  Africa is this idea of demonopolization and privatization of the telecom. So Germany,  I think, went through this in the 80s with Deutsche Telekom and it's private now. The  US had the same thing with AT&T, France Telecom, other big telecoms around the world. In Senegal,  the telecom company, the incumbent monopoly, is this company called Sonetel. And they privatized  in 1995. However, France Telecom bought 42% of the company. And a lot of people, including  Abadutup, were very upset about this because they felt that it kind of reeked of colonialism.  And it wasn't very kind of democratic in the way that they did it, but whatever.  By 1998, Abadutup advised the government to put on election rolls in the Senegalese presidential  elections. So what that means is people weren't sure kind of who was eligible to vote and  who had been officially registered. And this general had been put in charge of this project  and the general CSE went to Abadutup and he said, you know, what can we do? How can we  make people trust that they're actually registered to vote? And he said, well, just put them  on the internet. And so he did and people did that. There was little problems. He had  some personal information up there that people probably shouldn't have access to, their mother's  first names, which can be used as a personal identifier in Senegal. But it was a neat idea.  Even though at that time, 1998, very, very, very few people in Senegal had access to the  internet. But it was starting to come. And the government was buying into this as well.  And there were all kinds of projects. And this is kind of what I'm talking about, is  that there were a number of projects both from within Senegal and kind of coming from  other places that kind of started and then kind of fell apart. One of the first ones  was this program by the Senegalese singer, Yusuf Endur. Any Yusuf Endur fans out there?  Anyone? A couple? All right. So he's this famous Senegalese singer, very cool guy. He,  you know, plays in Europe and Senegal, of course, and all kinds of stuff. He's like  a UNESCO, UN, like cultural ambassador or something, very charismatic guy. And he had  this idea of founding these Joko Clubs. And Joko is a wall-off word. It's a local language  in Senegal and it means connection or link. And the idea was to build kind of cyber centers,  cyber clubs, community centers, places where people could go, kids could go and use the  internet and stuff. And HP Hewlett Packard was involved and they were putting up all  kinds of money. He gave it, there was a big speech about it, I believe at Davos during  this time and, you know, everybody was really excited. But it kind of fell apart because  it relied on a big American company or a big company to keep bankrolling this project.  And the project fell apart by 2002. By 2003, the American government got involved and they  had something called the Digital Freedom Initiative. Anyone heard of the Digital Freedom Initiative?  Anyone? No? All right. One person. Okay. So this was a project that was started by the  American government under the Bush administration. The idea was to bring better internet access,  better connectivity to various places around the world and to teach entrepreneurs and people,  again, as a development project. And the first country they picked was Senegal. And so there  were all kinds of committees. There were American and Senegalese advisors that were trying to  figure out how to make the internet work better in Senegal. They established a cybercafe in  the middle of one of the biggest markets in downtown Dakar. But again, the project was  funded for three years. It kind of fell apart after two years. That cybercafe that they  built is still there. At least it was when I was last in Senegal four years ago. And  it feels like every other cybercafe. And this was also around the same time when lots and  lots of private cybercafes were opening up all over Senegal. So it didn't, again, that  one didn't really go anywhere. I mentioned earlier, I just wanted to show this is a  cable map of Africa. And so for those of you who may not know where Senegal is, it's, if  you can see on the map there, there's the westernmost point in the north where that  little text on purple and orange, Senegal is just north of that because that's Capol Verde.  So Senegal is kind of the westernmost point in Africa. And like I said, Senegal is geographically  well placed. You can see these massive data cables running down the coast of Africa. And  their landing stations are in Senegal. And actually the countries, the landlocked countries  that are next to Senegal, like Mali and some of these other places, actually have to rely  on data access from Senegal because of the cables. And I actually just saw a tweet this  morning that Nigeria, I think it's Nigeria, since some of these newer cables that you  can see there in the diagram, like the orange and the purple ones, Nigeria internet traffic  is up like 400% since one of these new cables was turned on. And as you can see, East Africa  is really deficient in terms of connectivity as well. Anyway. So Digital Freedom Initiative  didn't really go anywhere. By December 2003, the president of Senegal, this guy, Abdul-Iwad,  had his own idea, which was to create something called Digital Solidarity. Anyone heard of  this? The Digital Solidarity Fund? No? Okay. So yeah, so this was this idea. He proposed  it in the WSIS conference, the World Summit on the Information Society that was in Geneva.  And he said that, you know, look, part of the reason why Senegalese people and other  people in the developing world don't have access to the internet or don't have as much  access as we would like is that stuff is too expensive, right? So what I want to do is I  want to make, I want to create a program where people at the point of sale in, let's say,  Berlin, you walk into a shop, you're like, hi, I want to buy a laptop, it's 1,000 euros.  Would you like to donate 10 euros to this Digital Solidarity Fund that would then go  to people in other countries? This didn't go anywhere at all. They created a foundation  in France and another one in Switzerland and this didn't, also didn't go anywhere.  In the meantime, Sonatelle is raking in the cash. I'm pretty sure Sonatelle is the most  profitable country, or most profitable company in Senegal. In 2007, they had a profit of  $310 million. Pretty good. And still, you know, Senegalese internet penetration remains  kind of low and this is what I say when Senegal might be, there are probably some other ones  that would fit this category as well, might be one of the best least connected countries  and that's what I'm saying is that, and I think part of it has to do with education,  part of it has to do with level of economic activity. Only 40% of Senegalese people can  even read, so already 60% of people can't use the internet because they can't read.  So yeah, so that's the story of Senegal, this is the In-Nut Show.  Moving on to Estonia, one of my favorite places. I am really obsessed with Estonia. I could  talk for hours about, just about Estonia. I had never been to Estonia, I'd barely heard  of Estonia until about six years ago when I read an article in the Christian Science  Monitor that said that Estonia had declared internet access as a human right and that  just blew my mind and I started reading up on Estonia and I discovered that Skype had  come from there and all this kind of stuff and that was pretty amazing.  Again, a little bit of history. The Nazis, so Estonia, I didn't know as I was reading  about it, Estonia, for those of you who may not know, Estonia is way up in the north of  Europe, not that far from here, up by Helsinki in Russia and they were invaded over the  last thousand years by basically all of their neighboring countries at various points. The  Baltic Germans were very active in the 19th century in Estonia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden,  all kinds of other countries came and went in Estonia. By the 1940s the Nazis were up  in there hanging out for a couple of years. Then the Soviets came in, right? And the Soviets,  they said, okay, Estonia, we don't want you to learn about liberal arts and social sciences  and stuff. We want you to be technological, we want you to be scientific. So what did  they do? They established in 1960 the Institute for Cybernetics and they established it right  in Tallinn, Estonia and they were doing exactly what it sounds like, cybernetic research and  stuff like that, which I think is pretty cool. In 1967, this guy, Velio Hammer, was born.  For those of you who've been to Estonia, you'll know, as I said, there's free Wi-Fi all over  the place, you can thank this guy for doing that. Velio Hammer has become this kind of  Wi-Fi evangelist just kind of preaching how great free Wi-Fi is. And so as a result, there's  free Wi-Fi in the airport, in the port, in the bus station, in farmhouses, in all kinds  of places all over the country. Estonia became independent, of course, at the end of the  Soviet period, 1991, and Estonia kind of woke up as best as I can tell and kind of rebooted  itself, if you will. And so there were all these ideas coming around and one of them  was this Tiger League project or Tigri-Hupa in Estonian. And the idea was, let's wire  the entire country, let's put the internet access in every school in all of Estonia.  Estonia is not that big of a country, 1.3 million people. As somebody said earlier,  I think that's the size of, you know, a decent size German city. In American terms, that  would be like San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley put together. Anyway, so they, you  know, they went on this ambitious project and they connected all the schools and they  spent a lot of money and they, you know, and there was this idea that, again, that we can  kind of leap forward into the future. There were other ideas too, like the Digital Signatures  Act and the Digital ID Card Act that created these digital ID cards. E-Parliament, the  system where if you were, so the Estonian government, as best as I understand it, they  have a cabinet of ministers and they propose bills on anything, you know, transport, defense,  economics, whatever, and they discuss it and then once they agree, then that bill gets  sent to the Estonian Parliament and then they vote on it and it becomes law. But so they  said, well, it's stupid that we're printing out all these bills and you've got all these  stacks of paper, so why don't we do this online, right? So if you go to Tallinn, you'll see  there's this kind of online interface and they said, okay, we're going to put all the  bills online and if the ministers don't discuss them online before the physical in-person  meeting, then the bill passes, right? The idea was that if it's not worth discussing  online, it's not worth discussing in-person, so let's just streamline this process. And  so that's what they did. Wi-Fi EE was established. This is Velio's website and he catalogs all  of the Wi-Fi hotspots all over the place. 2003, the first Skype prototype was born and  it was actually created, the very first Skype offices, they now have their own offices,  but I find it interesting that their very first offices were actually in the Institute  of Cybernetics. This is what some of these Wi-Fi hotspots look like. That's actually  in a public park, but that logo, that Wi-Fi EE logo, you see it, it's very common. You  see it just like you would see on a restaurant, you know, Visa Mastercard, Eurocard, whatever  bank card, you know, for at a bar or a restaurant or something, and then you'll see a little  Wi-Fi sticker. And that's what the Estonian ID cards look like. Again, they're about the  size of a European bank card and they've got little chip, and so what you do is you plug  that into a USB card reader, you go onto a citizen's portal and you have access to all  kinds of government services ranging from, you know, paying your parking tickets or your  speeding tickets or checking your university admissions or paying your taxes or voting  in national elections. And that's pretty cool. And then I wanted to throw the Skype thing  up there because, you know, Skype is from Estonia too, and when you get to Tallinn  Airport, this splash page of Skype comes up and says that, you know, Skype is sponsoring  the Wi-Fi there. Anyway. So yeah, and then Estonia kind of progressed in this way as  well, and I guess you could say the really, I think, kind of one of the moments that Skype  kind of arrived onto the world stage or kind of, you know, yeah, this kind of landmark  moment was when President Bush received as a gift a Skype phone from Estonian Prime Minister  Anders Ansip when President Bush was visiting Estonia in 2006. By 2007, Estonia had started  this program of online voting. Again, using these digital ID cards, there's digital signatures  and encryptions and all this kind of stuff. People, I'm sure anyone who's read anything  about Estonia, oftentimes, at least in the American press, they call it Estonia now.  In 2007, you might have heard there was a little bit of a cyber skirmish, cyber attack,  cyber war. It's very scary. There was a statue of a Soviet soldier in Tallinn that was in  a park, and the Estonian government had decided to move it to a different park outside of  town. A lot of Russians still living in Estonia got very upset. As a result, a lot of Estonian  websites got attacked as a form of political protest. There were Russian language websites,  not like kind of traditional underground hacking kind of websites, but I think we saw kind  of a similar thing with Anonymous where people kind of made it very easy. It was just like,  okay, follow these steps, and you too can join the cyber attacks against Estonia because  they moved our statue. So government websites were hit. These were  DDoS attacks. These were kind of hacktivist, like defacing, you know, putting up false  statements on the prime minister's website and stuff. It wasn't very kind of threatening.  I don't think. The Estonians investigated. They tried to figure out who did this. Of  course, everybody in Estonia pretty much believes that the Russian governments either implicitly  or explicitly was behind it. Only one guy was ever actually not even convicted. He  pled guilty. This guy, Dmitry Galdyshevich, he is an ethnic Russian but Estonian citizen  living in Estonia. He admitted guilt as to participating in these attacks and he was  fined $1,700 and didn't serve any jail time. And the Estonians basically felt frustrated  because their Russian counterparts would not give them access to any kind of data or records  and stuff. As a result of these cyber attacks, the cooperative  cyber defense center of excellence, logos up there in the top, was established in Tallinn  in 2008. This is part of NATO. This is a research center that is devoted to cyber defense and  cyber security that they created in the wake of these attacks. And in fact, Estonia had  actually proposed this idea way back in 2003. But, you know, NATO was like, oh, cyber attacks,  it will never happen. And then it did and then they got their center.  And one of the other cool things is that in 2011, this year, you can now use your mobile  phone to authenticate yourself for online voting. So you can register and you get a  special SIM card with some special encryption on it and put it in your phone. And so instead  of having to put your ID card into your computer or into a card reader to authenticate your  identity when you want to vote, you can now do it by cell phone. You can't vote over your  phone, but you can authenticate. Anyway, last country, Iran. I wrote about  this guy, Omid Mehmatian. He's an Iranian journalist and blogger. He now lives in San  Francisco. He has become part of a group of people, including my own father, who are  basically permanent exiles from Iran. Germany has a large Iranian community as well. And  Iran actually has a really interesting history when it comes to the internet. I think Iran  has one of the highest internet penetration rates in all of the Middle East. It's something  like 33, 35 percent give or take. And Iran has been on the internet for a pretty long  time, actually. Way back in 1993, Iran was able to connect to the internet through Austria,  through an academic network called CSNet. And it kind of slowly grew, again, similar  story to some of these other places that I mentioned. By 1995, there was 30,000 people  online. By 2000, there was a million Iranians online. By 2008, that number jumped to, I  think, like 20, I think, tens of millions, 20 million, something like that. Big number.  Again, you know, it's important to understand the history and the politics, I think, because  as I said, this is about kind of what kind of emerges out of these countries. By 1997,  a guy by the name of Mohammed Khatami was elected president. He was the president before  the current president, Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005. Khatami was president  from 1987 to 2005. He was viewed as a moderate, as somewhat of a reformer, as he had spent  some time in Europe, actually, in Germany. And he really pushed for some reforms within  the Islamic system. He opened up media. He allowed newspapers to open. He allowed civil  society to kind of open up. He allowed for nonprofits, non-governmental organizations  to open up. There was a moment, there was a few years where there was kind of a moment  of opening up a little bit of Iranian society. Of course, you know, there were certain, what  they call red lines, that you couldn't cross, right? You couldn't say anything bad about  the Islamic Republic. You couldn't say anything bad about the Supreme Leader. I told the  whole, hominy, and so forth. And by 2000, as, you know, more and more Iranians are getting  online, we have the first instance of the government pushing back against what's happening  on the Iranian internet. There was this guy called Ayatollah Monteseri. He was a reformer,  reformist Ayatollah against the government. He had formally been really kind of part of  Iranian government, he had been closely associated with Aitolahomini, the supreme leader, the  leader of the Islamic revolution.  But during the 1980s, he kind of fell out of favor.  He disagreed with some of the brutal policies that the government imposed during the Iranian  Iraq War, during the 1980s.  So he was basically under house arrest for the rest of his life, from the 1980s until  when he passed away just a couple of years ago.  In 2000, he posted a memoir on his website, Monteseri with an i.com, and he posted this  memoir and he described what he had done and what he had seen in his relationships with  the government and said all kinds of bad things that the government didn't want to get out.  And so what did they do?  They started their own website.  They started Monteseri with a y.com.  So they cyber-squatted him, kind of.  And they were trying to fool people into going to the wrong website and it didn't really  work.  But I think that that's kind of interesting, that they cared enough to create a fake webpage  to fool people from reading this guy's stuff.  By fall 2001, as blogs were starting to come about in the US and in Europe, the first Iranian  blogs were coming out too.  And I don't know if this is still true, but there was a period when Persian was like the  number three or number four language amongst blogs in the world, which is kind of surprising  given that it's a relatively small language with respect to the whole world.  And there was this guy called Hossein Dirakshan, also known as Hodor, who published a guide  in Persian, teaching Persians how to blog in their own language.  Hodor.com started supporting Unicode as a way to make it easier for people to get online.  Various people were arrested and Sina Muatalebi, the first guy to be arrested, was arrested  as he had published some articles that were saying some bad things about the government  as well.  He was a journalist and he was talking about how that there were things that the government  wasn't doing enough to fight, for example, unemployment, which is a big issue, and other  things like that, and he was arrested.  And there was a whole series of people, including Omeed, who I profile in my book, the guy who  was pictured who were arrested at the end of 2004.  So for all of you bloggers and Twitterers in the room, which I think is probably most  of you, you are in company with President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Aitol Hamani.  They're both blogging and Twittering.  Aitol Hamani has a Twitter account here.  You can go follow him.  He tweets in Persian and English.  I don't know how good your Persian is, but you can read his stuff there.  So yeah, this was a sign that came up during some of the protests from 2009, which I really  like, which is, you know, God is with us.  Are you filtering him too?  Of course, the internet in Iran is filtered and censored and blocked and stuff like that.  And I'll just move quickly through this so I can finish up and get time for questions.  As you know, and I talked a little bit about this earlier, there was this movement to,  you know, there were a whole bunch of series of protests.  Twitter and Facebook where people were pushing out videos and things like that.  The government was also pushing back.  I was having conversations with some people earlier about there was this website, geardob.ir,  which used these photos.  And I don't know if you can see, there's little red circles around people's faces.  And on that webpage, the government is basically asking people to identify protesters.  Yeah.  Recently, they had this blogging competition that was only open to pro-regime blogs, so  that was interesting.  And I guess, you know, people have been asking me, like, oh, do you think Iran is different  than Egypt and Tunisia and what's going on?  And I guess for me, like, my kind of gut feeling is that it is really different.  You know, one of the main reasons that I don't like the term Twitter revolution is because  revolution implies that things have dramatically changed, but nothing has dramatically changed  politically speaking in Iran.  The government is still there.  You know, things are going on.  Yeah, there's, you know, a little bit of protests and stuff.  But I think one of the major differences, you know, is that the Iranian government has  shown that it's been willing to use, you know, force, right?  It sends out armies of guys on motorcycles with clubs and beats people up, right?  And what's different about that in Egypt is that the Egyptian government, you know, even  with all of the people coming to Tahrir Square and all this kind of stuff, you know, the  Egyptian army didn't fire on people.  And I think that's a really big difference, you know, same with Tunisia, right?  There wasn't that same kind of use of physical violence against people.  So I think that that's something that, again, we often lose sight of.  Anyway, I'm done.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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Hi, good morning. I know everyone's maybe a little hungover or tired from yesterday, but I appreciate you coming out to hear me speak. My name is Saru Svarvar. I am an Iranian-American journalist. I currently live in Bonn, Germany. I've just written this new book called The Internet of Elsewhere. It's coming out this month. It'll take a little longer to get into Europe because they still have to put it on ships and send it over. I apologize. If you Google it, you'll find my website and you can order it or ask your local books or whatever. Anyway, I work currently at Deutsche Welle in Bonn, Germany, Deutsche Welle English, so your taxes pay for my job. So thank you. And I host this program called Spectrum. It's in English. It's about Germany and European science and technology. You can check it out there. I've also worked for these other radio programs in Canada and in the US. So my book is about The Internet of Elsewhere. What does that mean? That means that the Internet, of course, that some of you are using right now that we all know and love, it's kind of the same, right? When you use the Internet in Germany or whether you use it in this case Mauritania, kind of your experience is the same. So what do I mean by The Internet of Elsewhere? Well, I mean that the things that the Internet produces are different in different parts of the world, right? So there's a reason that various kind of, you could call them applications, you could call them effects emerge in different parts of the world, right? There's a reason why the Internet itself was born in the time and the place in which it happened, which is to say Southern California in the late 1960s. But I feel like we've lost this understanding, this kind of historical context, if you will, of how the Internet is this kind of thing that collides, if you will, with history and context. We recently saw things in Egypt and Tunisia and now Libya as well, other parts of North Africa and the Middle East, where there was this idea that these were Facebook revolutions and that people were using social media and how great is that? And that's changing the face of the Middle East. You know, but of course, I don't know, I guess I'm a little bit more skeptical about that because as some of you may know, Egypt shut down the Internet for five days prior to Mubarak's stepping down from power. And yet the protests got bigger. So to me, that seems a big kind of check against this idea that the Internet as a concept is an actor in these things, right? That in this case it produces democratic change. We've seen this before in Iran, right? Two years ago, you probably know there was this presidential election, it was very controversial. Ahmadinejad won the election and is now the president, again, of Iran. And there was this idea that people were speaking out against the government and using Twitter, using all kinds of social media, and again, really pushing people to the streets. This was this narrative that was created, I think, in the American media. I don't know how much attention it got over here in Europe. But you know, there was this idea that, again, the Internet is this actor that, you know, changes a country and changes a society. But that also applies to situations that aren't political, right? That applies to development. There's this concept that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, which is called ICT4D, ICT4 Development Information and Communications Technology for Development. So there's this idea that, you know, we see it in projects like the One Laptop for Child or there's a non-profit startup in San Francisco called Invinio, and there's all kinds of other projects, where, you know, if only we bring technology, information technology, mobile phone technology, internet technology, Wi-Fi, whatever, to a place, then we create some effect, right? Then we create economic development, right? So again, there's this idea that the Internet or technology or information technology is somehow acting upon that place. And I'm not trying to say that that, you know, it doesn't help. But I guess I don't really, as I've done research for this book, I believe less in this kind of primary kind of acting relationship. But the thing is, we've seen this idea before. This idea is even older than that. Nicholas Negroponte said back in 1995 that, you know, the Internet will flatten organizations, it will harmonize people, the nation-state will go away, but the nation-state, you know, as we all know, is still very much here. And this is an idea that's even older than that, right? With this quote was taken from a book that I highly recommend you guys read. It's called The Victorian Internet, and it's about the rise of the telegraph around the world. And there was this idea back then, too, that the telegraph, you know, is connecting people and harmonizing people, and that's so awesome. And, you know, and again, like, that didn't really happen. And so, you know, this is kind of what we've been reduced to, I feel like, is like when you have the Internet and you bring it to a place, right, either some kind of change happens, some kind of political change happens, some kind of economic change happens, and that's great, you know. And again, I'm not trying to say that it doesn't help, that it doesn't, it's not good for people to have mobile phones and to have internet access, of course it is. But what I'm trying to show is that it's more complicated than that, and I would argue more interesting than that. So, I took a look at my book at four different countries, as he said, South Korea, Estonia, Senegal, and Iran. So, you might ask, well, why these countries, right? And this is the longer part in my book that I explained how, you know, what I'm trying to argue is that when the Internet arrives in a particular place, it collides with what's already there, right? The Internet doesn't arrive in the same point in a country's history in every place, right? Some people are more literate or less literate, more educated or less educated, have more economic power or less, or have more political freedoms or less. And when it arrives at that place at that time, it does something to the character of the Internet and it emerges really interesting ideas and really interesting things. So, I looked at Korea, right? Why Korea? Because Korea is the world's most wired country in the world. I don't know how many people have been to South Korea. Anyone from South Korea? All right, well, a couple of people. So, South Korea is this really wacky place, right? It's got the world's fastest and cheapest and most widespread broadband of anywhere in the world, right? This is according to the OECD. South Korea is also the place that has, and this is what this picture is showing, the world's most developed e-sports league. These are young Koreans playing professional Starcraft, right? These are people who are paid tens of thousands of dollars, in some cases as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars, to do nothing but play Starcraft. There are two television channels in Korea devoted to showing Starcraft. I'm not joking. And you can go, this is in the e-sports stadium in Seoul. And, you know, and so this is what they've done now with their internet, right? This is one of the things that's come out of their history. So I would put Korea at kind of one end of the spectrum. The next country that I wrote about is Senegal, which I would put not on the opposite extreme end of the other spectrum, but I would say somewhere a little bit closer. I would argue that Senegal is one of the world's best least connected countries. What do I mean by that? There are lots of countries in the world that have terrible, terrible situations. Places like Somalia, places like the former Zaire, places especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where there's been a lot of political and economic turmoil over the years. Senegal is a Sub-Saharan African country that is different than some of these other ones. In that, they've had a peaceful transition of power over the last 50 years since they became independent from France. And they're economically stable as well. So they've had political economic stability, that's good. They happen to be well placed to connecting to the undersea data cables that flow down the Atlantic Ocean, down across the western coast of Africa. And yet, so they have all these things that you would think would make the internet work well, would make more people get on the internet and use the internet, and make websites like this, which is called Face Dakar, which is the kind of gawker, if you will, of Senegal. It's a relatively new website. It's kind of a gossip news site, I guess. But it's only used by a really small percentage of the population. And so, you know, my question is, if Senegal is one of the best cases, one of the places in Sub-Saharan Africa where you would think the internet would work, why doesn't it work there? And that's, so Senegal is a little bit on the other side. The other countries are Estonia, which again I would put somewhere slightly less than South Korea, but you know, somewhere toward the middle top region. I obviously didn't write about every country in the world, so I don't know precisely what the rankings are, but you get the idea. Skype came from Estonia, right? And Estonia is this kind of place that I had, anyone, any Estonians in the room? One Estonian, I love you. Anyone been to Estonia? Good, a few people. So, you, those of you who have been to Estonia, you'll know, to me, Estonia is like a geek's paradise, right? There's free Wi-Fi everywhere. They have these really awesome digital ID cards. You can vote on the internet. You can access all kinds of government services on the internet. And of course, Skype, you know, came out of Estonia. And why did Skype come out of Estonia? Right? Why didn't Skype come from Silicon Valley or from Germany or from Australia or from anywhere else, right? Why did Estonia produce all of these kind of cool things? So that's what I'm trying to understand. And then again, somewhere in terms of connectivity, maybe further down, a little less than Estonia, maybe not quite as low as Senegal, is Iran. And Iran unfortunately has the distinction of being the world's first country to arrest a blogger. And they arrested this guy, Mr. Sina Motalibi, who was a journalist and blogger, and he was arrested in 2003. He now lives in London. And as we saw a couple years ago, with respect to people using the internet as a way to fight back against the government, right, there's been this kind of seesawing that's actually been going on a lot longer than 2009. It's been going on for over a decade now in Iran, where the government pushes one way against the internet, and people push back, and so on and so on. So this is a much longer, I think, more interesting story. So we'll take the first one, South Korea. In my book, I read about this guy. His name is Chun Kilnam, and he is a, this is just a little timeline of Korean history, and I think it's important to understand that. But yeah, so this guy's Chun Kilnam, he's now a professor in, he retired from his university in Korea, and now teaches in China and Japan. I didn't know a whole lot about Korean history before I started this. I don't know how many of you know a little bit about Korean history, but one of the things that I think is really important to understand about Korean history in the 20th century is this kind of weird relationship between Japan and Korea. And by weird, I mean, you know, not so good on the Japanese side. Japan annexed the entire Korean Peninsula in 1910, and so Koreans were basically forced to become Japanese. And Korean culture and language was very much suppressed for the beginning of the 20th century. Japan, of course, bombed Pearl Harbor and entered World War II in the 40s. 1943, the Pentagon is dedicated, right? So this is, again, in the kind of World War II period, and you know, Japan is kind of being defeated in the war and stuff. Chun Kilnam was born to a Korean family in Japan in 1943. And actually, he grew up speaking Japanese in Korea, excuse me, he grew up speaking Japanese in Japan even though his family was Korean, and he was ethnically Korean. Again, he was part of this, you know, this idea of kind of Japanizing people, even if they were from other places, especially from Korea. So the war ended in 1945, and eventually, you know, these kind of issues, unresolved issues from the Potsdam conference just down the river didn't resolve what was happening in Korea, right? And so the Soviets and the Allies were, you know, in disagreement over what should happen with Korea. So we've got this Korean War in North and South Korea, okay. So then we get into the 1960s, and there's this guy named General Park Chun-hee who takes power in Korea, he was a general, and he becomes this kind of dictator, but you know, he's an interesting guy because on the one hand, yes, he was a dictator, yes, he was authoritarian, yes, it was not a democratic system. However, he did create this amazing economic development program that continued for decades, kind of what he said in motion. And just kind of a key example of that, I think, which is kind of amazing, is that in 1961, there were 30,000 cars registered in South Korea. 35 years later, that number was up to 10 million. And for those of you who have been to South Korea, you'll know that it's, you know, it just is, I would say, just as developed and modern as anywhere else in the world. So, okay, so now we get to the 60s, right? And Chun-hee studies mathematics in Japan, and then he thinks about maybe going to do graduate work actually at Moscow State University to study mathematics. But during the 1960s, as Korea, there were kind of pro-democratic protests going on in Korea at this time, and he was kind of, he kind of felt this pull toward Korea. He felt kind of alienated in Japan, and even though he didn't speak Korean, and had never actually been to Korea until the 60s when he traveled there with his mother for the very first time, he didn't really know anything about Korea. And, but yet, somehow he felt like he didn't have a future in Japan, and he felt like he was kind of duty bound to help his ancestral home country. And so he thought about, okay, well, what could I do that would be helpful to this country that is undergoing this rapid, rapid development? And he thought, well, maybe I could be a doctor, but it turns out that, you know, hospitals kind of freak him out a little bit. He doesn't like the smells and blood and stuff. So then he thought, okay, mathematics, maybe information science and maybe computer science, because, you know, that would be useful to people as well. And so he looked around at various universities, and he decided to enter UCLA as a graduate student studying computer science in 1966. Now, for those of you who know your internet history, you'll recognize this, right? UCLA in the late 1960s was like the place to be for people working on this obscure thing called the ARPANET, right? And the ARPANET is what is now our internet, right? It started at UCLA in the 1960s as this American government-funded research project. That guy right there is a professor at UCLA, still teaches. His name is Leonard Kleinrock. And what he's standing next to is something called the IMP, which is the world's first router. So all those little, you know, 20-year-old routers that you guys have in your apartments or houses, originally they looked like that, and they cost, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. So, Chonthil Namar arrives at UCLA. He is classmates actually with Vince Surf, who invented TCPIP. TCPIP, of course, is what makes the internet function. So it was really kind of fortuitous that Chonthil Namar was around what was going on at UCLA at the time. And so what happens is Chonthil Namar, he studies, he gets his doctorate, he works and teaches for a little bit in California, but then he gets an offer to come back to Korea. Again, he'd never lived there. And he starts working on what he calls the system development network. This is the 1980s. And he's made a professor at this place called KAIST, which is the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. It used to be in Seoul, the capital. Now it's in Daejeon, which is a city about two hours south of Seoul. And so his idea was this, let's build the internet in Korea, right? And this is the 1980s. This is when the internet is still a relatively new thing. It's this kind of obscure computer science project. There's only a few internet nodes that exist, I think, probably by the 80s. I'm guessing that there was something like on the order of hundreds or thousands of nodes spread around North America, Europe, other parts of the world. And so he said, okay, well, we need to build our own network. And we need to build our own computers and our own stuff. And so he had this idea of making this network to connect. He was basically replicating the ARPANET. And this was kind of his own pet project. And so he, as a professor, he had graduate students. And these graduate students in the 1980s, they became this kind of dream team. And they went on to, and because of his experience in Japan and in the US, and knowing what he wanted to do, he wanted to create something new in Korea that had never been there before, which was to say the internet and technology, he told them, I don't want you to be professors. I don't want you to be academics. I don't want you to do what I did. I want you to be entrepreneurs. I want you to be leaders of industry. I want you to develop this country through the means of technology. And so what he would do is, it was almost like a start-up, right? These students of his, they would wake up at 9, 10 in the morning, they would code, they would hack, they would try to, you know, they were building routers, they were trying to make this stuff work. And then, and they would work till, you know, midnight, 1, 2 in the morning, whatever. But then on the weekend, he would, and this is my favorite part, he would make them go rock climbing. He would make them go hiking. He would make them go skiing. He would, you know, it was very kind of regimented, and he would tell them, he would kind of instill into them this idea of pride and of duty to the country. These were young computer scientists in their early mid-20s. They were exempted from military service. They were given full scholarships. They were just, you know, all the doors were opened for them. And he was saying, look, you guys have to take this seriously, and I will work you, you know, doing stuff during the week, and then you will have to work physically too, because, you know, I want you to be able to not only solve these problems, but to, you know, be healthy so you can work on this project. But so what happened was, so they did build it, they built this network. It did connect to the Internet. I believe it was the first non-U.S. project to, that was kind of independently developed to connect to the Internet. And so, and he got what he wanted, which was that these students of his, they came out of this program doing exactly that. Jin Ho-hoor is a Korean entrepreneur now, and he launched the first private Korean Internet service provider in 1998. The first broadband service was launched in Korea, and the person who was kind of in charge of that part of the company was also one of Chon-Kilnam's students. And through that, because it was so disruptive in the Korean market at that time, there were other companies that came on, and there was major, major price wars, and that was really what developed, what kicked off this kind of high, excuse me, very pervasive broadband across Korea. Also, in 1998, a guy by the name of Jake Song, he wrote a program called Lineage. This was a really, really big MMORPG, massive multiplayer online role-playing game, well before World of Warcraft and all the rest, again, developed by one of his students. And Lineage actually really pushed into the Korean Esports Players Association, that slide that I showed earlier with the guys, that guy in that pod playing StarCraft, right? This is this group that does this, Caspa. And so they, you know, it really kind of snowballed into that direction. And so, you know, I think that this is, again, this is a, if you want to kind of, a lot more details, there's more stuff in my book. But, you know, I would say that this combination of high levels of education, of nationalism, of duty, of pride, of these kinds of things really kind of pushed Korea into this direction. And they viewed the Internet as a means to getting to development. Obviously, they did a lot of other stuff too. And by 2007, they had hit 90% broadband penetration. I don't think that my home country of the United States has that high of broadband penetration. So let's move on to Senegal. And, okay, so in Senegal, I write about this guy, Amadou Tup. He is now also an entrepreneur and developer and kind of activist guy in Senegal. While I was researching Senegal, and I actually lived in Senegal as a student for about half a year in 2002, 2003, 1946, IBM actually shows up in French colonial Senegal. And they were hired to build kind of the IT systems or the kind of proto IT systems of the Senegalese National Railway and a few other kind of big government projects. And they thought that they could make money just like they had in other French colonies, like in French Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia, those kinds of areas, Morocco, other places like that. And this was kind of the, I guess, early kind of IT environment that Amadou Tup was born in. He grew up as a kid under colonial Senegal, of course, occupied by France. And then Senegal became independent in 1960. By the later, by the end of the 60s, he won a logic and mathematics competition that was held by IBM. He later went on to work at IBM. And they, you know, he kind of rose through the ranks of IBM. He lived in France for a little while and, you know, really benefited from being exposed to various types of technology and development and things like that. By 1985, he had left IBM and he started his own company in Senegal. And then he attended CES for the first time. And 1995 was, I probably, I would guess, maybe some of the more geeky, hackery people in the room probably were using the Internet earlier or the web at least, or a little earlier. But I know for myself, you know, that was around the time when I first got exposed to the Internet and to the web. And Amadou Tup was the same thing. He saw an early demo version of Netscape while he was at CES in Las Vegas. And he just thought, man, like, this is really cool. We've got pictures, we've got text, we've got all this stuff. That would be great for Senegal. But, you know, he was worried about it being expensive and stuff like that, which is definitely an issue in Sub-Saharan Africa. But, you know, the kind of seed was planted in his head. And he went on to really encourage the government and he kind of ingratiated himself to various government officials and really tried to push the government to use more websites and for people to use the Internet in a better way. One of the issues that also happens in Senegal, or not just in Senegal, but in Sub-Saharan Africa is this idea of demonopolization and privatization of the telecom. So Germany, I think, went through this in the 80s with Deutsche Telekom and it's private now. The US had the same thing with AT&T, France Telecom, other big telecoms around the world. In Senegal, the telecom company, the incumbent monopoly, is this company called Sonetel. And they privatized in 1995. However, France Telecom bought 42% of the company. And a lot of people, including Abadutup, were very upset about this because they felt that it kind of reeked of colonialism. And it wasn't very kind of democratic in the way that they did it, but whatever. By 1998, Abadutup advised the government to put on election rolls in the Senegalese presidential elections. So what that means is people weren't sure kind of who was eligible to vote and who had been officially registered. And this general had been put in charge of this project and the general CSE went to Abadutup and he said, you know, what can we do? How can we make people trust that they're actually registered to vote? And he said, well, just put them on the internet. And so he did and people did that. There was little problems. He had some personal information up there that people probably shouldn't have access to, their mother's first names, which can be used as a personal identifier in Senegal. But it was a neat idea. Even though at that time, 1998, very, very, very few people in Senegal had access to the internet. But it was starting to come. And the government was buying into this as well. And there were all kinds of projects. And this is kind of what I'm talking about, is that there were a number of projects both from within Senegal and kind of coming from other places that kind of started and then kind of fell apart. One of the first ones was this program by the Senegalese singer, Yusuf Endur. Any Yusuf Endur fans out there? Anyone? A couple? All right. So he's this famous Senegalese singer, very cool guy. He, you know, plays in Europe and Senegal, of course, and all kinds of stuff. He's like a UNESCO, UN, like cultural ambassador or something, very charismatic guy. And he had this idea of founding these Joko Clubs. And Joko is a wall-off word. It's a local language in Senegal and it means connection or link. And the idea was to build kind of cyber centers, cyber clubs, community centers, places where people could go, kids could go and use the internet and stuff. And HP Hewlett Packard was involved and they were putting up all kinds of money. He gave it, there was a big speech about it, I believe at Davos during this time and, you know, everybody was really excited. But it kind of fell apart because it relied on a big American company or a big company to keep bankrolling this project. And the project fell apart by 2002. By 2003, the American government got involved and they had something called the Digital Freedom Initiative. Anyone heard of the Digital Freedom Initiative? Anyone? No? All right. One person. Okay. So this was a project that was started by the American government under the Bush administration. The idea was to bring better internet access, better connectivity to various places around the world and to teach entrepreneurs and people, again, as a development project. And the first country they picked was Senegal. And so there were all kinds of committees. There were American and Senegalese advisors that were trying to figure out how to make the internet work better in Senegal. They established a cybercafe in the middle of one of the biggest markets in downtown Dakar. But again, the project was funded for three years. It kind of fell apart after two years. That cybercafe that they built is still there. At least it was when I was last in Senegal four years ago. And it feels like every other cybercafe. And this was also around the same time when lots and lots of private cybercafes were opening up all over Senegal. So it didn't, again, that one didn't really go anywhere. I mentioned earlier, I just wanted to show this is a cable map of Africa. And so for those of you who may not know where Senegal is, it's, if you can see on the map there, there's the westernmost point in the north where that little text on purple and orange, Senegal is just north of that because that's Capol Verde. So Senegal is kind of the westernmost point in Africa. And like I said, Senegal is geographically well placed. You can see these massive data cables running down the coast of Africa. And their landing stations are in Senegal. And actually the countries, the landlocked countries that are next to Senegal, like Mali and some of these other places, actually have to rely on data access from Senegal because of the cables. And I actually just saw a tweet this morning that Nigeria, I think it's Nigeria, since some of these newer cables that you can see there in the diagram, like the orange and the purple ones, Nigeria internet traffic is up like 400% since one of these new cables was turned on. And as you can see, East Africa is really deficient in terms of connectivity as well. Anyway. So Digital Freedom Initiative didn't really go anywhere. By December 2003, the president of Senegal, this guy, Abdul-Iwad, had his own idea, which was to create something called Digital Solidarity. Anyone heard of this? The Digital Solidarity Fund? No? Okay. So yeah, so this was this idea. He proposed it in the WSIS conference, the World Summit on the Information Society that was in Geneva. And he said that, you know, look, part of the reason why Senegalese people and other people in the developing world don't have access to the internet or don't have as much access as we would like is that stuff is too expensive, right? So what I want to do is I want to make, I want to create a program where people at the point of sale in, let's say, Berlin, you walk into a shop, you're like, hi, I want to buy a laptop, it's 1,000 euros. Would you like to donate 10 euros to this Digital Solidarity Fund that would then go to people in other countries? This didn't go anywhere at all. They created a foundation in France and another one in Switzerland and this didn't, also didn't go anywhere. In the meantime, Sonatelle is raking in the cash. I'm pretty sure Sonatelle is the most profitable country, or most profitable company in Senegal. In 2007, they had a profit of $310 million. Pretty good. And still, you know, Senegalese internet penetration remains kind of low and this is what I say when Senegal might be, there are probably some other ones that would fit this category as well, might be one of the best least connected countries and that's what I'm saying is that, and I think part of it has to do with education, part of it has to do with level of economic activity. Only 40% of Senegalese people can even read, so already 60% of people can't use the internet because they can't read. So yeah, so that's the story of Senegal, this is the In-Nut Show. Moving on to Estonia, one of my favorite places. I am really obsessed with Estonia. I could talk for hours about, just about Estonia. I had never been to Estonia, I'd barely heard of Estonia until about six years ago when I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor that said that Estonia had declared internet access as a human right and that just blew my mind and I started reading up on Estonia and I discovered that Skype had come from there and all this kind of stuff and that was pretty amazing. Again, a little bit of history. The Nazis, so Estonia, I didn't know as I was reading about it, Estonia, for those of you who may not know, Estonia is way up in the north of Europe, not that far from here, up by Helsinki in Russia and they were invaded over the last thousand years by basically all of their neighboring countries at various points. The Baltic Germans were very active in the 19th century in Estonia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, all kinds of other countries came and went in Estonia. By the 1940s the Nazis were up in there hanging out for a couple of years. Then the Soviets came in, right? And the Soviets, they said, okay, Estonia, we don't want you to learn about liberal arts and social sciences and stuff. We want you to be technological, we want you to be scientific. So what did they do? They established in 1960 the Institute for Cybernetics and they established it right in Tallinn, Estonia and they were doing exactly what it sounds like, cybernetic research and stuff like that, which I think is pretty cool. In 1967, this guy, Velio Hammer, was born. For those of you who've been to Estonia, you'll know, as I said, there's free Wi-Fi all over the place, you can thank this guy for doing that. Velio Hammer has become this kind of Wi-Fi evangelist just kind of preaching how great free Wi-Fi is. And so as a result, there's free Wi-Fi in the airport, in the port, in the bus station, in farmhouses, in all kinds of places all over the country. Estonia became independent, of course, at the end of the Soviet period, 1991, and Estonia kind of woke up as best as I can tell and kind of rebooted itself, if you will. And so there were all these ideas coming around and one of them was this Tiger League project or Tigri-Hupa in Estonian. And the idea was, let's wire the entire country, let's put the internet access in every school in all of Estonia. Estonia is not that big of a country, 1.3 million people. As somebody said earlier, I think that's the size of, you know, a decent size German city. In American terms, that would be like San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley put together. Anyway, so they, you know, they went on this ambitious project and they connected all the schools and they spent a lot of money and they, you know, and there was this idea that, again, that we can kind of leap forward into the future. There were other ideas too, like the Digital Signatures Act and the Digital ID Card Act that created these digital ID cards. E-Parliament, the system where if you were, so the Estonian government, as best as I understand it, they have a cabinet of ministers and they propose bills on anything, you know, transport, defense, economics, whatever, and they discuss it and then once they agree, then that bill gets sent to the Estonian Parliament and then they vote on it and it becomes law. But so they said, well, it's stupid that we're printing out all these bills and you've got all these stacks of paper, so why don't we do this online, right? So if you go to Tallinn, you'll see there's this kind of online interface and they said, okay, we're going to put all the bills online and if the ministers don't discuss them online before the physical in-person meeting, then the bill passes, right? The idea was that if it's not worth discussing online, it's not worth discussing in-person, so let's just streamline this process. And so that's what they did. Wi-Fi EE was established. This is Velio's website and he catalogs all of the Wi-Fi hotspots all over the place. 2003, the first Skype prototype was born and it was actually created, the very first Skype offices, they now have their own offices, but I find it interesting that their very first offices were actually in the Institute of Cybernetics. This is what some of these Wi-Fi hotspots look like. That's actually in a public park, but that logo, that Wi-Fi EE logo, you see it, it's very common. You see it just like you would see on a restaurant, you know, Visa Mastercard, Eurocard, whatever bank card, you know, for at a bar or a restaurant or something, and then you'll see a little Wi-Fi sticker. And that's what the Estonian ID cards look like. Again, they're about the size of a European bank card and they've got little chip, and so what you do is you plug that into a USB card reader, you go onto a citizen's portal and you have access to all kinds of government services ranging from, you know, paying your parking tickets or your speeding tickets or checking your university admissions or paying your taxes or voting in national elections. And that's pretty cool. And then I wanted to throw the Skype thing up there because, you know, Skype is from Estonia too, and when you get to Tallinn Airport, this splash page of Skype comes up and says that, you know, Skype is sponsoring the Wi-Fi there. Anyway. So yeah, and then Estonia kind of progressed in this way as well, and I guess you could say the really, I think, kind of one of the moments that Skype kind of arrived onto the world stage or kind of, you know, yeah, this kind of landmark moment was when President Bush received as a gift a Skype phone from Estonian Prime Minister Anders Ansip when President Bush was visiting Estonia in 2006. By 2007, Estonia had started this program of online voting. Again, using these digital ID cards, there's digital signatures and encryptions and all this kind of stuff. People, I'm sure anyone who's read anything about Estonia, oftentimes, at least in the American press, they call it Estonia now. In 2007, you might have heard there was a little bit of a cyber skirmish, cyber attack, cyber war. It's very scary. There was a statue of a Soviet soldier in Tallinn that was in a park, and the Estonian government had decided to move it to a different park outside of town. A lot of Russians still living in Estonia got very upset. As a result, a lot of Estonian websites got attacked as a form of political protest. There were Russian language websites, not like kind of traditional underground hacking kind of websites, but I think we saw kind of a similar thing with Anonymous where people kind of made it very easy. It was just like, okay, follow these steps, and you too can join the cyber attacks against Estonia because they moved our statue. So government websites were hit. These were DDoS attacks. These were kind of hacktivist, like defacing, you know, putting up false statements on the prime minister's website and stuff. It wasn't very kind of threatening. I don't think. The Estonians investigated. They tried to figure out who did this. Of course, everybody in Estonia pretty much believes that the Russian governments either implicitly or explicitly was behind it. Only one guy was ever actually not even convicted. He pled guilty. This guy, Dmitry Galdyshevich, he is an ethnic Russian but Estonian citizen living in Estonia. He admitted guilt as to participating in these attacks and he was fined $1,700 and didn't serve any jail time. And the Estonians basically felt frustrated because their Russian counterparts would not give them access to any kind of data or records and stuff. As a result of these cyber attacks, the cooperative cyber defense center of excellence, logos up there in the top, was established in Tallinn in 2008. This is part of NATO. This is a research center that is devoted to cyber defense and cyber security that they created in the wake of these attacks. And in fact, Estonia had actually proposed this idea way back in 2003. But, you know, NATO was like, oh, cyber attacks, it will never happen. And then it did and then they got their center. And one of the other cool things is that in 2011, this year, you can now use your mobile phone to authenticate yourself for online voting. So you can register and you get a special SIM card with some special encryption on it and put it in your phone. And so instead of having to put your ID card into your computer or into a card reader to authenticate your identity when you want to vote, you can now do it by cell phone. You can't vote over your phone, but you can authenticate. Anyway, last country, Iran. I wrote about this guy, Omid Mehmatian. He's an Iranian journalist and blogger. He now lives in San Francisco. He has become part of a group of people, including my own father, who are basically permanent exiles from Iran. Germany has a large Iranian community as well. And Iran actually has a really interesting history when it comes to the internet. I think Iran has one of the highest internet penetration rates in all of the Middle East. It's something like 33, 35 percent give or take. And Iran has been on the internet for a pretty long time, actually. Way back in 1993, Iran was able to connect to the internet through Austria, through an academic network called CSNet. And it kind of slowly grew, again, similar story to some of these other places that I mentioned. By 1995, there was 30,000 people online. By 2000, there was a million Iranians online. By 2008, that number jumped to, I think, like 20, I think, tens of millions, 20 million, something like that. Big number. Again, you know, it's important to understand the history and the politics, I think, because as I said, this is about kind of what kind of emerges out of these countries. By 1997, a guy by the name of Mohammed Khatami was elected president. He was the president before the current president, Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005. Khatami was president from 1987 to 2005. He was viewed as a moderate, as somewhat of a reformer, as he had spent some time in Europe, actually, in Germany. And he really pushed for some reforms within the Islamic system. He opened up media. He allowed newspapers to open. He allowed civil society to kind of open up. He allowed for nonprofits, non-governmental organizations to open up. There was a moment, there was a few years where there was kind of a moment of opening up a little bit of Iranian society. Of course, you know, there were certain, what they call red lines, that you couldn't cross, right? You couldn't say anything bad about the Islamic Republic. You couldn't say anything bad about the Supreme Leader. I told the whole, hominy, and so forth. And by 2000, as, you know, more and more Iranians are getting online, we have the first instance of the government pushing back against what's happening on the Iranian internet. There was this guy called Ayatollah Monteseri. He was a reformer, reformist Ayatollah against the government. He had formally been really kind of part of Iranian government, he had been closely associated with Aitolahomini, the supreme leader, the leader of the Islamic revolution. But during the 1980s, he kind of fell out of favor. He disagreed with some of the brutal policies that the government imposed during the Iranian Iraq War, during the 1980s. So he was basically under house arrest for the rest of his life, from the 1980s until when he passed away just a couple of years ago. In 2000, he posted a memoir on his website, Monteseri with an i.com, and he posted this memoir and he described what he had done and what he had seen in his relationships with the government and said all kinds of bad things that the government didn't want to get out. And so what did they do? They started their own website. They started Monteseri with a y.com. So they cyber-squatted him, kind of. And they were trying to fool people into going to the wrong website and it didn't really work. But I think that that's kind of interesting, that they cared enough to create a fake webpage to fool people from reading this guy's stuff. By fall 2001, as blogs were starting to come about in the US and in Europe, the first Iranian blogs were coming out too. And I don't know if this is still true, but there was a period when Persian was like the number three or number four language amongst blogs in the world, which is kind of surprising given that it's a relatively small language with respect to the whole world. And there was this guy called Hossein Dirakshan, also known as Hodor, who published a guide in Persian, teaching Persians how to blog in their own language. Hodor.com started supporting Unicode as a way to make it easier for people to get online. Various people were arrested and Sina Muatalebi, the first guy to be arrested, was arrested as he had published some articles that were saying some bad things about the government as well. He was a journalist and he was talking about how that there were things that the government wasn't doing enough to fight, for example, unemployment, which is a big issue, and other things like that, and he was arrested. And there was a whole series of people, including Omeed, who I profile in my book, the guy who was pictured who were arrested at the end of 2004. So for all of you bloggers and Twitterers in the room, which I think is probably most of you, you are in company with President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Aitol Hamani. They're both blogging and Twittering. Aitol Hamani has a Twitter account here. You can go follow him. He tweets in Persian and English. I don't know how good your Persian is, but you can read his stuff there. So yeah, this was a sign that came up during some of the protests from 2009, which I really like, which is, you know, God is with us. Are you filtering him too? Of course, the internet in Iran is filtered and censored and blocked and stuff like that. And I'll just move quickly through this so I can finish up and get time for questions. As you know, and I talked a little bit about this earlier, there was this movement to, you know, there were a whole bunch of series of protests. Twitter and Facebook where people were pushing out videos and things like that. The government was also pushing back. I was having conversations with some people earlier about there was this website, geardob.ir, which used these photos. And I don't know if you can see, there's little red circles around people's faces. And on that webpage, the government is basically asking people to identify protesters. Yeah. Recently, they had this blogging competition that was only open to pro-regime blogs, so that was interesting. And I guess, you know, people have been asking me, like, oh, do you think Iran is different than Egypt and Tunisia and what's going on? And I guess for me, like, my kind of gut feeling is that it is really different. You know, one of the main reasons that I don't like the term Twitter revolution is because revolution implies that things have dramatically changed, but nothing has dramatically changed politically speaking in Iran. The government is still there. You know, things are going on. Yeah, there's, you know, a little bit of protests and stuff. But I think one of the major differences, you know, is that the Iranian government has shown that it's been willing to use, you know, force, right? It sends out armies of guys on motorcycles with clubs and beats people up, right? And what's different about that in Egypt is that the Egyptian government, you know, even with all of the people coming to Tahrir Square and all this kind of stuff, you know, the Egyptian army didn't fire on people. And I think that's a really big difference, you know, same with Tunisia, right? There wasn't that same kind of use of physical violence against people. So I think that that's something that, again, we often lose sight of. Anyway, I'm done. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
about The Internet of Elsewhere. What does that was born in the time and the place in which it well, why these countries, right? And this is the world's most wired country in the world. I don't anywhere in the world, right? This is according to the OECD. South Korea is also the place that slightly less than South Korea, but you know, world's first country to arrest a blogger. And take the first one, South Korea. In my book, I internet is still a relatively new thing. It's think that my home country of the United States He later went on to work at IBM. And they, you exposed to the Internet and to the web. And about it being expensive and stuff like that, when I was last in Senegal four years ago. And it also around the same time when lots and lots of this category as well, might be one of the best access in every school in all of Estonia. Estonia digital ID cards. E-Parliament, the system where take. And Iran has been on the internet for a story to some of these other places that I it's important to understand the history and the