The European: You have compared the internet to a box of LEGO. What is the conceptual understanding behind that comparison?
Surman: The internet has a very simple message for us: “Build me”. It is a very open-ended system with the explicit invitation to develop it as we move along. It can become anything you want it to be. It can be Wikipedia, Facebook or visual art. It’s this open endedness that has driven so much wealth, productivity and creativity.

The European: One recent development has been the idea of the app. Apps are powerful tools in terms of creativity but in their current use might signal a return to the internet of closed spaces. The App Store says “Build Me” with a lot of fine print.
Surman: I think we need to step back and unpack what is happening with apps. The current version of apps is a threat to the internet and bad for consumers. A small number of companies like Apple or Google control over who gets to bring what applications to market. You have to use the set of tools they provide and ask them for permission before you can publish anything. That is not the approach that has thus far driven innovation on the web. If we follow that path, we will soon hit a wall. We would not see new telephone apps because it would not be in the interest of these companies to allow creativity to proceed in that direction. But at the same time the app model is very attractive on a conceptual level. The idea that you can create something quickly and share it with a large number of people is certainly prone to drive innovation. And we now see HTML5 tooling systems appearing that will allow us to create these small, encapsulated programs across platforms very effectively. What we want to do is bring these HTML5 apps to the fore and create an open ended collection of marketplaces where anyone can offer any app to anyone without asking permission from others.

The European: What is the role of profitability in that scenario?
Surman: It is okay that people want to monetize their ideas. The problem arises when there are only one or two channels to do this – where the market isn’t open. That is not how we generally believe the economy should be organized. If I walk across a market square, I should be able to shop wherever I want, and every vendor should be allowed to sell the products they want to sell. On the internet, too, we want an open-web ecosystem. Any app from any store should be able to run on any device.

The European: From the consumer perspective, there is a lot of convenience in the current model. You can buy hardware and software from the same company and end up with a very integrated system.
Surman: But it undermines the idea of the free market. If you believe that competition is an important aspect of our economy, the current model is not the right approach. Many people are getting angry – rightly so – that they have to ask permission and provide a but to companies like Apple to get their apps to market. Convenience can just as well be achieved with open technology. There would be a standard that ensures compatibility and convenience, but it would be used by many different stores to do many different things. For me, that is a philosophical point. I believe in the open internet. But for other people it might also just be a practical point: they are able to shop wherever they want without having to worry about whether the products they purchase would be allowed to run on other devices. My hope is that the closed-store model will not survive.

The European: Has the technological progress of the internet been matched by debates about issues such as ownership, independence or privacy? Have we developed the norms that are required to reason about the future of the web?
Surman: We are at a very interesting junction where we have to develop our conceptual understanding of the internet to make good choices. We have extensive social media networks, but we have no literacy in terms of privacy. I like to compare the current situation to the 1950s, when people first began to worry about obesity. People did not really understand how diets affected obesity. So before you could recommend healthier lifestyles you had to understand what constituted an unhealthy lifestyle. People had to understand what fat or calories or cholesterol meant and how they factored into our diets and into obesity. As a society, we consciously developed a literacy around these issues that allowed us to have informed conversations and make things better.

We are at that moment in relation to the internet. There are ten or twenty concepts that everyone should know about. What is the difference between personal data that is stored with me and data that is stored with another company? What is the difference between information itself and a link to information? If more people understand these concepts, we will be able to make better choices. And by making better choices, we will affect the products we create and the architecture of the internet.

The European: How do you want to bridge the gap between the small digital elite that understands these ideas very intuitively and the rest of the population that regards the internet primarily as a tool that can be easily used?
Surman: We need both an informed digital citizenry and responsible tech companies. Think about the obesity example again: It does not help me to understand the importance of calorie intake when I can only buy junk food. The same thing is true for the internet. People can be conscious of their privacy. But that alone is insufficient if the tools and products don’t offer good privacy protection. So the literacy needs to be supplemented by tools that bake the core values of the internet into the architecture of the web. Think about social networking: We want tools that allow the user to control what data is shared. We don’t want the data to be stored and shared by a few large companies.

The European: Yet that is precisely what has made Facebook so successful…
Surman: People use Facebook because it is a shiny service that easily connects people. That is legitimate and will always attract people. What we should be moving towards is a world where the social graph is under the control of the user. When you log into Facebook, that graph serves as the connection between the shiny surface and the stored personal data. That is a realistic option. Facebook might not be the first company to adopt that model, but there is enough interest that it can gain leverage in the market and ultimately become the mechanism to interact with bigger sites.

The European: For you, the question is less about the amount of information we share than about control over whom it is shared with?
Surman: There is no question that the value of the internet comes from the networks it allows us to develop. The linking of information is as important as the information itself. But we can imagine an architecture where my connections into the network remain under my control. Chris Messina at Google has thought a lot about this. He talks about a shift away from a document-centered internet where the value is derived from the information on websites towards an application-centered internet where the value comes from the connections that a large number of people have to and from each other. And then the next step is the you-centered internet, where the user is in the middle and can achieve a very personalized experience through the networks and applications that he decides to access. In this situation, the user holds and controls their own data – it’s not in the hands of a central social networking site. You get all the benefits from the application network, but there is a different mechanism for control and access.

The European: Is the internet still a tool or a platform – or has it already transcended that stage?
Surman: I think of the web as a platform that is becoming a structural factor. That opens up a lot of interesting questions: If we assume that the internet is central to the lives of more and more people, if it becomes central to our interactions with each other and our governments, we might want to think about how we can protect it as a public resource. In a democratic society, it should never be turned off. And you can even consider it being tied to basic human rights. There is a universal human right to communication, and the internet should become intimately connected to that.

The European: Is there a right to broadband access, as some have proposed?
Surman: I think we should not get down to that level of detail and attempt to define broadband access because the internet is changing very quickly. We want a definition that endures over hundreds of years. But the idea behind calls for universal broadband access is something I very much agree with.

The European: Right now, much of the internet is controlled by corporations – service providers, software companies, or server hosts. Do you think we have to re-conceptualize the internet as a property of civil society like other infrastructure networks?

Surman: There is no question in my mind that the internet should be a public resource. But I also think that we might have to think differently about public resources in a digital context. What does it mean for us to own the internet? And one of the neat things about the web is that its creation is not controlled by any one corporation. If we can avoid the closed models like we’re currently seeing with mobile app stores, anyone with the knowledge to use HTML5, JavaScript, etc. can build the tools and services of tomorrow. Private companies do business on the internet, but they are only pieces within a larger network. To keep their customers, they must finance the public resource of the internet by investing into network coverage or services. Creativity, too, cannot be expressed through corporate structures alone. All the things that turn the web into a useful network are already in the public domain.

The European: Is the internet fundamentally different in that regard from steps of innovation that we have seen in the past? Or do we tend to exaggerate the influence that it has on our culture and habits?
Surman: The internet is different, if only because of the speed of innovation. It has become incredibly easy to realize ideas through code and to build on existing ideas. Or take the ability to view source code. What other industry allows users to take a look at the blueprints of its products and tamper with them? That transparency is built into the internet and drives innovation. What is harder to assess is the impact of the internet on our culture and society. If we frame the question around “how” the internet changes us, the answer is unclear. We are very much in the middle of that process and much of the ultimate outcome will depend on our decisions and ideas. I would like to see the advent of an age of transparency in business and politics, and an age of creativity in culture and science. But that is not necessarily the direction it might take.

The European: Do you think that there is a natural limit to the speed of innovation? Are we witnessing an innovation bubble that will either burst or gently deflate after some time?
Surman: Who knows what will happen. I think the important question is about the constraints that people want to put on the growth of the internet. It starts with patents and copyright protection that slow down innovation. Those are concerns backed by the force of law, and our habits tend to change much quicker than the legal frameworks we build around them. And we often forget that increasing amounts of information might also have downsides, that we are losing control of our privacy. Innovation is not a smooth process. We want to slow down and hit the brakes, the tire blows out and we spin out of control. So there will be contentions issues as we struggle to come to terms with the implications of technological change. We want to strike balances. That takes time.

The European: So the determining factor is not technology itself, but our ability to reason about technology and establish new sets of norms and values?
Surman: If you think back to the industrial era, there were many technical and physical constraints, we were bound by atoms. In relation to the internet, the constraints are human. They might be abstract constraints – like the need for a philosophy for the internet or new sets of legal rules – or they might be deeper, cognitive constraints. It ties back to the idea of literacy: we want to be able to deal in a responsible manner with the speed of innovation. It starts with early childhood education, with growing up in a digital environment.

The European: Many of today’s adults grew up without the internet. Is that an important factor in understanding current debates about legal reform or privacy norms?
Surman: If you grow up with something, it just becomes more natural. Today’s choices seem to revolve around the importance we give to values such as openness and transparency. That might not even be an issue for our children or grandchildren anymore; I hope that these values will seem very natural to them. But what other reflexes will they have learned? What other norms will they have internalized by growing up in a digital world? So they will still have debates about the path of innovation, but those debates might be very different from the issues we are discussing today.