Okay, I'm just going to start.

So, here's a statement. The existing free speech regulations and protections are obsolete. What? Okay. There's some feedback. They are obsolete because they were invented for a time which has long since passed.

The existing free speech regulations in the world are the philosophical descendants of the French and American revolutions and were really, really good for solving the purposes of that time. But since then we've had an industrial revolution, we've had two world wars,

we've had the beginning of the information age and nothing has really changed. We still have the same fundamental idea of how to protect the way we have communication. And this just isn't acceptable. Because the internet itself has absolutely changed our information culture.

It has changed the way we communicate with each other. It has never been as easy to have conversations. And despite this, we are seeing a culture where the media itself is being attacked increasingly subtly. The attacks against the media are not as brutal as they used to be.

And it's still the case in some countries that journalists disappear and end up dead somewhere. But in most of the Western world this just doesn't really happen anymore. What happens in the Western world is that they get censored by all sorts of mechanisms.

There's libel, there's, copyright is often used to censor, there's all kinds of mechanisms. So this just doesn't only apply to old media, it also applies to people who are using the internet, using Twitter, using blogs, using all these new kinds of communications which have been allowed to us

by this new technology. So we need to kind of rethink things. So about a year ago a couple of people sat down and we thought, okay let's look at what is actually being attacked. What are the attack factors for free speech or against free speech that are used very commonly.

And we went around and we looked at how different legislative structures are being used to counteract these. How different countries are trying to protect our free speech. And we came up with a proposal which kind of gathered together what we think was the best of,

the kind of dream team of free speech regulation or protection. And we wrote a little parliamentary resolution proposal which went through the Icelandic parliament and in June last year the parliament accepted the proposal and said,

Iceland would like to become a free speech haven. We know that this is good because the last country that did it is still the dominant empire on the planet. That's rapidly changing but still they had a lot of benefits from that. And there's a lot of reason to do this kind of thing but it can't really stop there.

So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to run quickly through the different things that we included. And the first is source protection. That is the right to protect sources from being attacked or being divulged. It's just making sure that the journalist doesn't have to tell a government or somebody else who his sources were.

Of course there's exceptions to this. For example in the case of maybe a murder where only divulging the identity of the source might solve the murder case. That would be a feedback solution.

Source protection. It's really good. It makes people who want to remain private, remain private.

Then one issue we want to deal with is data retention. Of course this is one that's been solved here in Germany. But data retention is a very bad thing if you have source protection. Because it means that even if the journalist is protecting his source and is legally allowed to do so,

retained data can be used to figure out who that source is. So we need to contract this idea, this trend of data retention, because it is a way of attacking our privacy without us actually knowing of it. You know, storing data before we actually have a chance to have a say in it matter.

It's kind of being spied on always at no cost. And at least governments shouldn't be able to do that. Intermediary liability protection is another thing. It's essentially a question of do intermediaries in communications,

the people who are transmitting your data from point A to point B, all the people in between, C, D and E, do they actually have some obligation to behave in a certain way? Are they going to have to do filtering, censorship, or are they legally accountable if you transmit something that is illegal?

Now, we believe that that should not be the case, because if that's the case, then everybody will start to prevent information that they think might be illegal from going through. The crazy example of this is in China, where everybody knows of the Great Firewall of China, this big censorship mechanism.

But most of the censorship doesn't actually happen at the border where the government is operating. It happens within the state, because the state just issued a blanket statement, do not embarrass us. And of course everybody's going to interpret that in the strongest possible way, because they don't want to have to deal with the result of having embarrassed the government.

So we want intermediaries to be safe. Now, open government, open data, this is very important, because without this, our ability to see what the government is doing and how it's doing it, and whether decisions are being made on a good basis, is very strongly challenged.

And there's been a lot of talks about this this week, or today, yesterday. So, not going to dwell too much on this, but we thought, okay, let's look at different Freedom of Information Acts and see which ones are really good. Estonia and Norway have very modern Freedom of Information Acts, which just raise the bar quite a bit.

They just say, okay, all data should be open and public by default. If there's exceptions, then they should be dealt with in a very strict and particular way, which is kind of the opposite of what it used to be. It used to be that people would have to ask for information, specifically every single time, and often they wouldn't even know what data it is they were asking for.

They would have to kind of guess whether the data exists and where it exists. Then there's kind of my personal favorite at the moment, which is history protection. Not a lot of people know this, but it is very frequent for newspapers to get legal action against them

months or even years after an article has been published. And this is done by people who want their Google record, their search results, to not show them in a bad light.

So people like, say, Ukrainian oligarchs or rich business people who have been caught doing something bad will sue newspapers and say, well, you know, it's all right. We won't take you to court if you just remove it from your database. And of course, newspapers are never going to tell anybody they did this,

but they have a good reason because it costs a lot to go to court. It costs a lot to stand up for their right to have published. So we thought, okay, let's count the number of days since publication and see if there's a pattern. We haven't actually established this pattern yet. This is kind of what we think it's going to look like. We're about to do some research on that. And then we say, okay, so there's some financial gain from having published.

It's going to drop off very quickly. The frequency of legal threats is going to come in days or weeks, maybe, the maximum. So let's put down some limitations

so that it makes sense for the newspapers to stand up for their right to publish while it makes economic sense for them to do so. But at the point in time when it is no longer economically viable for them to do so, the state comes in and says, no, you cannot file a lawsuit there.

No, you cannot remove this from the database. So we're considering that kind of legislation. Now, England is a very nice place. No, it isn't really. I lived there for a couple of years. It's not all that nice. But they have this wonderful libel law,

which unlike every other libel law in the world except for, well, there's a couple of Australian states, and there's a few places. But in most places, libel law works in such a way that if I sue you for libel, I have to prove that you were libelous. In the UK, it's the other way around. If I sue you for libel, you have to prove that you were not libelous.

And because of this flip around, it's incredibly expensive for people to protect themselves, and often they end up going bankrupt defending themselves against entirely nonsense claims. So we're hoping that England gets its act together,

and there's already a bill before Parliament in England to fix this. But in the meantime, we want to create some kind of limitations that if somebody files a libel suit in England against a citizen from another country, then we want people in that country to say,

no, wait, this goes against our general order, our rule of law. We do things the other way around, so we're not going to honour any court verdict like that. And it just means we're going to bring the libel case to the home country of whoever's being sued. We think that's a fairly reasonable thing to do.

So this idea of libel tourism is something we want to stop. Now, process protection is another thing. In a lot of places, the United States are notoriously bad for this. It is incredibly expensive to protect yourself and protect your free speech. Everybody in the US always goes, oh, we have First Amendment rights.

We have the right to say or publish anything. But in reality, that's not necessarily the case, as in the Church of Scientology versus Time Magazine case, where Time Magazine did a cover story about Church of Scientology. All was well, except Church of Scientology sued them for it, saying it was libelous,

and they had to fight their way all the way to the Supreme Court to actually be acquitted and win. They finally won, but this meant they had spent $7 million in current value protecting their right to free speech. That's something Time Magazine can do once or twice, but most people, most organizations, most companies can never do that.

So we want to put some onus on the people who are filing lawsuits if they're going to make claims, and they have to be ready to stand up for those claims if they end up losing.

Just as a final example, I think, limiting prior strength. So prior strength is when you are prevented from publishing something before you've actually published it. And this is really bad. In Iceland we had an example a couple of years ago in 2009

where the Kripink, which was a large Icelandic bank, their large loan book was leaked on WikiLeaks, and the local news agency wanted to report on this, except they got an injunction just prior to going live

saying you cannot report on this. So that's the kind of thing we don't want. When there's something in a clear public interest we want people to be able to report on it. The old saying is publish and be damned. You publish first and then are damned later. Being damned first is not very nice. So there's some issues on media ownership.

Who owns the media outlets, that kind of thing. Not necessarily something that bloggers are very interested in or in the social media sense. But another issue which is more interesting is the idea of refugee journalists because there's asylum seekers who are essentially information asylum seekers.

People who have had to flee their home countries because they're being threatened, either imprisonment or even death, just for having written an article, published an opinion, spoken at a rally, something like that. Having published information and now they're wanted by the government or by some special interests.

So we don't really want people like that to have to suffer and we need to protect the rights of these people to flee to another place. Refugee issues in Europe in general are incredibly bad. They're regulated by the Dublin Conventions

and essentially the first country that a refugee comes into has to deal with the refugee case. So this means that there's a lot of pressure on countries like Greece and the Czech Republic to deal with refugees from further east. But in reality, it isn't good for those countries to have to deal with everything.

It should be more equally distributed. So, you know, big issues here. But, you know, all of these proposals that ME is trying to push forth, they don't actually solve all the problems.

People are still going to get killed. There's still going to be other problems. And law is actually just policy. It's just a decision that people make and they decide to abide by. People will be able to violate it and, you know, we want to promote the technological solution if possible. If everybody used strong encryption,

then that would actually solve a lot of the problems that we're dealing with. But most people don't, so in the meantime, it would be good to have some laws to protect your rights. Now, the title of this talk was about how ME can be a bridge between the internet and the state.

And so, you know, having gone through what proposals we were making, we kind of need to ask, OK, how does this matter to us? I'm from the internet. You guys are, you know, I live or work on the internet. And, you know, that's what really matters, the internet to us.

So the values of the internet people are different from the values of the government people in that, you know, we have a very strong urgency for the ability to share information. If we can't share information, we can't, you know, then the internet is worthless. The internet is for sharing information.

And it's also different from the values of the corporate people because there's a lot of corporate interest in making sure that people don't share information in a certain way or certain information about how things are done, that kind of thing. And, you know, it turns out that governments have existed for a very long time and they exist to kind of protect our values.

So, or at least that's what they say they exist for. But if they want to protect our values in this new digitized age, they need to protect our rights to receive, change and transmit information. So this idea of free speech needs to be reformulated in terms of information rights.

It needs to be changed from a question of whether people can stand up on a soapbox and talk to whether people can write a blog or a tweet or, you know, basically have conversations with each other. And, you know, taking us into European context because, you know, Iceland isn't really all that interesting.

It's a tiny little place. I just added in this little graph. This is kind of how Europe works. It takes a long time to decipher it, but, you know, there are things there in Europe. There's the Council of Europe. There's the European Union. These things supposedly exist to protect our values.

So, you know, the European Parliament just a couple of days ago passed this with regard to Iceland. They say that, you know, the European Parliament welcomes the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, which enables both Iceland and EU to position themselves strongly with regard to legal protection

of freedoms of expression and information. Now, I should have highlighted that word information because that's a really important one. The European Union is founded on this idea of four fundamental freedoms, the free movement of goods, labour, capital and services. And, you know, it's a very economical idea.

If you want to abolish the borders and allow these things to flow, then you get something that is closer in some way to a pre-market situation. OK, you know, people might agree or disagree, but this is a fairly strong thing. Except, how do we know where we need the goods, the services, the capital and the labour? How do we get the information about what is needed where?

Well, it turns out, free movement of information is more important than free movement of any of these because, you know, if we can't move the information about where it's needed freely, then we can't actually, you know, move them in a sensible way. So, we're kind of talking to people now and proposing that maybe the European Union ought to add a fifth freedom.

A fifth freedom. Free movement of information. Very simple. Right? And, if we can do that, if we can just get that embodied in the European Union itself,

then every directive that comes from the European Union after that will have to be enlightened by this decision. Right? Instead of always talking about information freedom on a human rights perspective, which is what we always do, I mean, information is most valuable to us as humans because, you know, at the end of the day, technology is only about humans. But, you know, framing it from an economic perspective, that way we can, you know,

maybe convince people who weren't otherwise convinced that freeing our information flows is a good thing to do. So, finally, we need help. We just founded this institution around the idea of ME and what we're trying to accomplish,

both in Europe and Iceland and around the world. So, please help us. We need all the help we can get. So, thanks.