Jari Arkko's speech at the Nokia Foundation Award event, Helsinki, Finland, November 24, 2016. Thank you. I'm honored to be recognised by you at Nokia Foundation and honored to be with you all here tonight. But of course I am just one person. I would like to underline how many people are collaborating across the industry. And how many understand the importance of Internet technology for our lives and business. I have been an Internet geek pretty much as long as it was possible. From an early user at TKK to building router and security products to my current job at Ericsson Research, where I build prototypes IOT gadgets and 5G systems. I started my career by studying at TKK or Aalto. I think that many of you in the audience have done the same. I have this interesting situation at home also in that four out of the five in the family have or are studing computer science in Aalto. The one remaining one is 14 years old, so lets see what he will do later. I've been very lucky to get to witness some of the Internet technology and other developments from the front seat in the last four years as a chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF. And by the way, when I say front seat I mean more of a theater seat than a driver's seat. The Internet evolution happens through individual choices among thousands of people and organisations rather through central direction. But this is not to say that nothing we do as individuals matters. The Internet is constantly affected by individuals who pick the right approach and convince others. And, my observation is that we are at a point in the Internet’s evolution where Internet-wide change is becoming easier and more likely than before. The IETF's role is to work on the core Internet technology, such TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, and so on. And of course we work together with many others, such as the open source community. When I became the chair in 2013, I thought I'd be focusing on things that only us engineers were interested in. Boy was I surprised! A couple of months later Snowden happened, which caused the whole world to rethink Internet security and privacy. Later in the same year we started a project to rework how the Internet's central resources like addresses are administered, which lead to world-wide interest from not just the techies but even governments and the US political system in particular. Even when the matter itself was not political at all. And the next year it started to become clear how big revolutions we had going on in the technical sense. We reworked HTTP, the underlying web protocol, and now we're working on a far bigger change, QUIC, a UDP-based transport that replaces TCP and security layers. Five years ago I thought that we'd be stuck with all the same protocols forever. I no longer think so. For various reasons, change is now possible. And I don't think people have fully understood the implications yet. And this is just the start. SNOWDEN But lets go back to Snowden for a bit. Internet technology developers usually see themselves as bringing benefits of the technology to the world. So you can imagine the shock when you learn that something that you've worked on is being misused. Everyone knew about some level of surveillance, around the world. But the scale surprised us. And the IETF is a technical organisation. It isn't telling anybody whether some activity is good or bad. However, we had new information. We now understood better what threats exist in the Internet. But what should we do with this? It turns out that we had been through this in the past. In the late 1990s we had a big discussion of whether encryption could be used in the Internet at all. In the early 2000s various authorities were arguing that Internet should not use strong encryption. The IETF back then considered the issues, and decided that we have no other choice than to provide the best possible technology for the Internet. Had we not done that, were would we be today, say, with respect to e-commerce in the Internet? I'm glad we did what we did. Of course, technology goes only as far. Even perfect communications security won't protect you if you can't trust the other side in your conversation. And the authorities have plenty of tools to deal with criminals beyond mere wiretapping. After Snowden we've made the same conclusions again. We've updated our picture of the threats: pervasive survaillance is considered a threat, just like all the other security problems in the Internet. And we do our technical best in protecting against them. Since Snowden we've replaced bad algorithms and redesigned one of the main security protocols. IANA I also wanted to talk more about administering the Internet. The Internet is a distributed system, it doesn't need central control. However, a small number of resources needs some coordination. What top-level domain names there are, who has what IP address, and a number of technical parameters such as port numbers. For decades, those decisions have been made by the Internet community. But an organisation called IANA or Internet Assigned Numbers Authority keeps a record of those decisions. Historically, the US government has had a role in overseeing this record-keeping activity. Over the years, the government had no real role in this arrangement, as the communities grew to handle everything. In fact, the role of the US government was a bit of a risk because it created a perception of control, which wasn't there. And consequently, arguments about inserting some other countries in that control. In 2013 we as leaders of various organisations in the Internet community said that we'd like to see this changed, and ultimately, US government agreed, and a project was launched. Thousands of people participated in this effort. We were able to move forward because we had community support, not because someone set the direction. We of course thought this would be easy -- it was in US government's interest to lose something where they had no real power and what was used as an argument against them in other matters. Boy was I surprised again. The matter got political in the campaign trail of US elections, with hearings in the congress and people like Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin opposing it. But in the end, the congress didn't oppose this change. And we won a last-minute legal challenge brought up by southern state Attorney Generals. Or should I say last 48 hour challenge. So on October 1, we made the change. In hindsight it was probably in the only moment when it was doable, so glad we did get it done. I've also been tracking what people outside our tech community say about this topic. The slogan for those opposing the change was that Obama is giving the Internet away. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Shortly after the change I was in DC and I asked my taxi driver if he knew about the change in the Internet. He did know about, and was concerned about it. I explained that it wasn't about US vs. Russia or China as much as government vs. private enterprise, and that most of the organisations were US-based anyway, like ICANN and IETF. And that the people in leadership positions in these organisations were from countries like Sweden or Finland. My taxi driver said that it would then be alright, but it would have been a totally different matter if it had gone to the French. TECHNICAL REVOLUTION Finally, I want to return to the technical changes that are ongoing with the web, and why they matter for us. I said earlier that I had thought the Internet is changing slowly, but now we are seeing a faster evolution. Some of the changes that we have seen include much larger fraction of web traffic being encrypted. This is partially due to Snowden effects, but also because companies have found it necessary for other reasons. And because IETF's work has made the cost of security smaller in a new version of the HTTP protocol. Secondly, we will likely see QUIC cause an ever bigger change in the transport layer. We needed all of the features and efficience improvements from the changes. But changes are also happening because the Internet is consolidating. A big fraction of the traffic is sourced from the big content players and CDNs. Consolidation may have some undesirable effects as well, but it makes it easier to evolve the Internet. As an example, Google hosts both content and provides software for many client devices. Or how one change at Akamai affects thousands of websites served by them. Our industry, the mobile industry, has felt these changes. Encrypted traffic has impacted some mobile operators, for instance. I'm here to tell you that my crystall ball shows further changes. The market dynamics will enable other things as well. And the technical solutions make evolution easier. For instance, once you put much of the transport and security functionality in web browsers, that can be updated much, much faster than things that used to be in kernel, like TCP. We could have new transports every month. Or Internet endpoints could take on some mobility functionality. We as the mobile industry need to understand this evolution in our 5G work, for instance. CALL FOR ACTION But I don't want to speak for too long. I told you about three things, security, Internet's administration, and evolution of the web technology. Many of you in the audience are working on the technology evolution in the academia and elsewhere. I have two calls of action for you: 1) First and foremost, there are interesting things happening to the Internet. You can have an effect in it. Pick the topics that matter. Pick topics that will ultimately benefit the end user. 2) Secondly, we are individuals and we compete as businesses, but we also need each other, because the biggest changes are the ones that we can only do together. Work on something where you can get the whole industry to go with you. With that, I want to thank you again.