The leader of the Mozilla Project, whose Firefox Web browser now has 350 million users, said Sunday that she is concerned that legal restrictions could limit Internet expansion.
Mitchell Baker said she worried about “the increase in laws that make it difficult to run an open network,” especially rules about content.
“You suddenly become liable for anything that gets downloaded, whether it’s legal or not,” she said. “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.”
Baker spoke at an opening panel of a three-day conference on digital innovation and creative ideas.
The DLD conference — which stands for Digital-Life-Design — is chaired by Hubert Burda of Germany, owner of Hubert Burda Media, and digital investor Yossi Vardi, who co-pioneered instant messaging and chaired the panel, titled “Disruptive.”
Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder of Skype which now has over 500 million users, said successful companies can’t become complacent and must continue to make improvements and not be afraid “of disrupting themselves.”
Vardi asked J.P. Rangaswami, chief scientist of the BT Group in Britain, what he thought of what Skype was doing to telecommunications companies like his.
“Watch this space,” Rangaswami replied cryptically.
Vardi then asked Rangaswami whether he sees the industry following Skype’s efforts to set minimal charges for phone calls around the world.
“I think those parts of the industry that don’t follow what Niklas is doing will either find themselves out of a job or working for him,” he replied.
American entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, whose nonprofit charity founded Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that has 350 million users, said it was a “very, very bad business” to try to compete against because the reference work is offered…