Privacy Talk with Wes Kussmaul, Founder of Delphi Internet Service: How is the birth of social media gradually monetizes your privacy
“This interview recorded on 20th March 2024 is talking about privacy and accountability.”
Kohei is having great time discussing privacy and accountability.
This interview outline:
- Introduction
- What did you start to involve in early days of Internet?
- How is the birth of social media gradually monetizes your privacy
Kohei: Thank you for everyone joining Privacy Talk. Today I’m so honored to invite Mr. Wes from the United States. He is one of the very important creators of the internet forum in the early days of the internet.
So thank you Wes, joining us for the interview.
Wes: Thank you Kohei. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Kohei: Thank you. First of all, I’d like to share his profile.
- Introduction
Wes was the sole founder in 1981 of Delphi Internet Services Corporation, “The Company That Popularized The Internet” according to Michael Woolf, and was the creator of the world’s first online encyclopedia.
At the time it was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1993, Delphi had been profitable for years and was among the four largest social networks, along with AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy.
In 1986, while CEO of Delphi, Wes launched a spinoff, Global Villages, Inc. to serve magazine publishers and business clients with their own private-label social networks.
Wes focused the attention of his new team on the need for reliable identities of individuals on the Internet, starting with the development of the VIVOS Enrollment Workstation.
While developing VIVOS, Wes began collecting source material for a book about a hypothetical world public key infrastructure, built upon digital certificates representing measurably reliable identities, which would bring authenticity to online interactions and privacy to individuals.
As the book began to take shape Wes was introduced to a group at the International Telecommunication Union that was attempting to implement a world PKI that was similar to the one he envisioned. Wes was subsequently appointed to the High Level Experts Group at the ITU’s Global Cybersecurity Agenda.
In an address in 2008 to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society in Geneva, Wes introduced the City of Osmio, a new certification authority.
Wes’s book, entitled Quiet Enjoyment, published in 2004 with a second edition in 2014, was followed by Wes’s other titles including Don’t Get Norteled in 2013 and Escape The Plantation in 2014.
Wes received his BS in physics in 1971 from the University of Central Missouri while serving at nearby Whiteman Air Force Base. Upon graduation and discharge he became a systems analyst at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, developing mainframe database applications for the next four years.
Wes is rated twelfth in the 2023 Thinkers 360 list of Top 50 Global Thought Leaders On Security. Wes seves on the boards of Transit X, Inc., Emmanuel Music, Inc., and Boston Baroque, Inc. and lives with his wife Maria Lewis Kussmaul, in Boston’s Back Bay. He has five children and three grandchildren.
It is great to see you, Wes at this time.
Wes: Thank you. That was quite a comprehensive review of my background.
Kohei: That’s amazing. So I would like to start the conversation with you on the first agenda. I’m very honest and I’m very curious to ask for your experiences at the beginning of the internet. Could you tell us why you started to develop services in the early years of the Internet age?
- What did you start to involve in early days of Internet?
Wes: Sure. so as you mentioned, we launched the world’s first commercially available online encyclopedia in 1981. Now back then the Internet was the ARPANET which was not strictly non-commercial. If you wanted to have a commercial online service there was another packet network protocol called X-25, X.25.
And that was how our users reached our servers. I think I should mention that the encyclopedia actually morphed into the Delphi social media, social network. The Encyclopedia did not do well. Well it did well commercially but our cost of providing it was much more than our unit revenue.
So it was not a wasn’t a good business. But when we stopped supplying the computer to access the encyclopedia database and then we added social features it became the Delphi social network and as they say, it was accessed by a dial-up X.25 network, so we had telephone modems and and people would dial a local phone number in one of these networks are telling that in time.
That’s how it all worked until around 1991. When a group in Colorado, the US state of Colorado very cleverly found a way to confront the operators of what had become the internet.
It was back in 81. It was the ARPANET but it became the internet and they confronted them to kind of compel them to support commercial traffic on the internet. And of course the internet is a much better probe. TCP/IP is a much better, more robust, more scalable protocol than X.25.
When they did that, Jack Rickard and Phil Becker, I can’t remember the other guy’s name but anyway they they offered to transport commercial traffic away from the Internet backbone and, propose that and the operators of the Internet backbone said you know well how are we supposed to tell which packets contain commercial traffic and which ones don’t?
And they said well, what’s your problem? What are we here to transport the commercial ones and they said no way to do this. So that’s when the US National Science Foundation just pulled out their hands and said, we can’t maintain this network or we can’t maintain these non-commercial policies.
And they pretty much you know, through the Internet open to all kinds of traffic and that’s around the time when Delphi basically migrated to the Internet.
There wasn’t suddenly it wasn’t overnight, but that’s that’s the process. So as I mentioned, TCP/IP is a much better protocol. But not long after that, of course, we started getting web based social media with a business model that we feel is right.
- How is the birth of social media gradually monetizes your privacy
It has been demonstrated to not respect privacy. You know, web based social networks from Facebook and Twitter, the Chinese networks.
You know, their business model is all about getting our personal information and monetizing it, selling it and in fact, these days a lot of the best customers for that private information, want to know just about our purchase habits and that sort of thing.
They want to know about relationships, beliefs, political feelings, political groups that were part of it because it turns out that advertising in these. I call them echo-chamber groups is particularly profitable.
That’s where the vendors of ridiculously overpriced diet supplements and investment schemes and all kinds of very high margin, high profit items are promoted and very sadly, anger is what drives a lot of these people to what I again call the echo-chambers these groups where people all sharing one worldview, one point of view, gather and they isolate themselves from wider discussions and wider sources of information.
（Movie: Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers）
And you know that it’s not a good thing when the most profitable use is, social media generated with anger. So it’s imperative that we find a way to bring countable anonymity and real privacy to online spaces.
And as I think you know, your answer to that is to address the fundamental nature of the internet that was originally characterized as an information highway, and I think that still fits. So what is a highway but an outdoor public transport system.
If we’re all working and living and keeping our files and letting our kids hang out by the side of the information highway. If that were a physical highway, we were spending our lives outdoors by the highway.
We would seek an indoor space and that’s what we need in the internet, indoor spaces, spaces of accountability, where you tend to know who’s in a room with you.
And indoor spaces are designated for particular uses by particular groups of people. And in our indoor spaces we have one version of it called a residence.
If you think about it, your home is a kind of a social network, where you bring your family and your friends and socialize in common areas in your home.
But then you also have an office in your home. Typically, with a file cabinet that contains important information. That’s not a public space. That’s not a common space. You know, your friends and neighbors don’t come wandering into your private office.
So in our call in my own office, we have a digital file cabinet called my own information. MOI and that is a PKI space. quite secure access only with your identity, PKI identity certificate, or by the PKI identity certificate of a designated licensee.
You designate your licensees to have access to your information. So for instance, your insurance company might issue them a license to have your name and address and perhaps the vehicle ID number of your car and the number of miles you drive if it’s an auto insurer, the number of miles you drive, and other pertinent information about insuring your car.
So your insurance company always has up to date information about that part of your life. That’s just one example of how you might share information from your MOI but no one gets to see information from you without a license from you.
So that’s how we view indoor digital spaces which I think will solve a lot of problems.
Kohei: Thank you for sharing this very important project. And as you mentioned, you are the creator of the first forum project and Delphi, so could you share about the project and why did you start that?
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