Dubai: The internet should be free and accessible to all regardless of any country’s jurisdiction, said Professor Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of MIT Media Lab, at a session titled ‘Future of the Future’.
“Just like every street light, public school, and library is free, the internet should be a free — it can be, it must be, and this is how you do it,” he said.
Negroponte told guests at the second day of the World Government Summit that launching thousands of low earth orbiting satellites can make the internet accessible in every square inch of the world. “It would cost $10 billion (Dh36.73 billion) to connect everyone in the world to the internet for 10 years — that’s five days of the US’ presence in Afghanistan,” he said.
Negroponte suggested creating a new entity in the United Nations called a communication agency that could run and manage the internet project, free of any one country’s control. He described the new entity as “a world food programme, but for the internet” — one that could equally distribute the connection worldwide.
“The best way to predict the future is to event it,” he said, quoting a close friend of his.
Negroponte touched on measure-based organisations such as the UN, sharing his belief that “you don’t have to measure the impacts of what you do, because the impacts should be so big that they’re self-evident”.
The 72-year-old professor also shared his views on education, pointing out that private education has had a negative impact on public education. Good education is not through extensive homework, we need competition to make the child collaborate, he explained.
“Capitalism is not democracy. Capitalism has hurt those who believe that democracy is the core element,” said Negroponte.
He called exceptionalism — “another word for nationalism- a disease”, pointing out that “everybody is like everybody else, and no one is racially exceptional for instance”.
