[Music]
Internet ethics is a really broad term.
It basically refers to the analysis of
the role that the internet plays in
what philosophers called the development
of the good life - the kind of life that
we want for ourselves, for society over
all, the kinds of people we want to be. Is
the internet playing a positive role in
the development of that kind of life or
is it hampering us in some way? And there
are a lot of issues that fall under that
umbrella. Everything from the role that
social media plays in the creation of
human relationships, to privacy, to net
neutrality, to the whole question of who
has and doesn't have access to the
internet, to the development of the big
data ecosystem, the kind of data that's
collected by whom and about whom and for
what purposes. There are a variety of
questions that fall under that term and
increasingly new questions because the
internet has some connection to every
aspect of our lives. One of the most
interesting ethical questions on
internet ethics revolves around privacy
online. Can the internet continue to be a
medium that invites creativity and
freedom of expression and freedom of
sharing information across borders even
as it's becoming a tool of mass
surveillance, either from corporate
entities or from governments or from
both? Increasingly we find that people
are concerned that their personal data
is being collected and stored and used
in a variety of ways that they're not
really aware of, that they don't want to
have used against them or in ways that
they don't anticipate, and it's becoming
really a problem for what had been a
fantastic way to allow people to
communicate. One of the phenomena that
the rise of the internet has led to is
the collection and analysis of big data,
which raises fascinating ethical
questions about who or what the data is
being collected about, who's being left
out of that kind of
data collection, who makes the decisions
about what is being done with that data,
and how much we can rely on it.
Because there's this air of objectivity
and completeness about this data that
turns out to be misleading, and at the
same time we are relying on it as this
objective source of truth on a very
widespread societal level. We allow big
data now to impact the decisions we make
about who goes to prison, who gets bail,
who gets a job, who gets insurance,
what kind of majors people might go into
in college. And it's fascinating to see a
kind of maturing of the field and big
data proponents and analysts themselves
finding out that they have a much
greater responsibility than they had
initially realized. One of
the ethical principles behind the
development of the internet has been net
neutrality, the idea that the pipelines,
the controllers of the pipelines of
the internet will not be able to pick
and choose between the kinds of content
that's available, that everything will be
able to flow freely. And increasingly
that's being challenged as the companies
that really run those pipelines try to
find ways to benefit or to encourage the
consumption of some content more than
others. And there are regulators getting
involved and there are civil
libertarians and civic groups trying to
argue that we want to have this
impartial, neutral, internet conduit. But
there are pressures against that and
that will be one of the really
interesting issues to watch, whether the
internet continues to be a sort of
neutral playground for communication and
transfer of information or whether some
content is really favored in some way
and what does that mean for freedom and
access to information in general. The Markkula
Center is in the heart of Silicon Valley,
and even here in Silicon Valley there
are people who don't have access to the
internet or who have very limited access
only via their phones or not through
broadband. And we hear stories about
students having to sit in their cars
outside of McDonald's or some other
place that offers free Wi-Fi. We need to
ask whether internet access should be
seen as a human right, especially in our
society, in our culture. So the fact that
there are still vast numbers of people
across the U.S. who have to struggle
with this is an ethical imperative for
the government and for corporations and
for school and for any other entities
that deal with the broad public to
consider, and to stop the assumption that
I think a lot of people have now that we
all have access to the internet and we
can all use those resources. It's simply
not true, and the ethical question of how
we create equality in a country where so
much is dependent on the internet and so
many people don't have access to it is
really important.