Online, you’re liable for anything: Mitchell Baker
Internet expansion is threatened by “regulatory disruption” caused by too much government meddling, warns Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker.
Speaking at a tech conference in Germany, she said she worries about “the increase in laws that make it difficult to run an open network,” especially rules about content, according to Right Side News.
“You suddenly become liable for anything that gets downloaded, whether it’s legal or not,” she said, stressing >>>
If you said to a municipality, if you build a road, you have to guarantee nothing illegal happens on it – that’s what’s happening on the Internet now. So that’s the kind of regulatory disruption that’s going to have some long-term consequences.
Mozilla developed Firefox “to disrupt”, the Guardian has her saying.
It was set out directly to attack a “big player”, she says, “hinting at Microsoft” and continuing, “Our agenda is personal control. Here, the Mozilla browser is a first step. Identity, data, what is the sense of me, issues like that will follow.”
However, she believes browsers are old-school, ready to be disrupted themselves, says the storing adding:
” ‘Facebook is a potential disrupter for how we access the internet’ she says. For her, Facebook is partly an application and partly a platform, but not as a social browser. Still she thinks the Mozilla project is important: ‘I want at least an option, an alternative,’ she says.”
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