Much has been discussed about the importance of an open Internet and the need to keep the Internet Giants from closing us all into their ecosystems. At Open-Xchange, it’s a drum we have been beating for quite some time. It has also become unavoidably obvious how the use of the services provided by the Internet Giants has affected privacy on a personal level. We have Edward Snowden to thank for letting us in on that fact.
So what can the people responsible for delivering, maintaining and evolving the Internet do to reverse the impact these revelations have revealed? The question is being asked this week to the hosting industry is: how to keep the Internet open, yet at the same time, more secure? On the French-German border town of Rust, over 5000 of the most influential computing business leaders and Cloud Hosters have gathered to debate where our industry needs to start.
Thomas, Soeren and the crew at WorldHostingDays created a “safe harbor” for us to expand this discussion as an industry with one of the most outspoken activists for Internet openness and privacy. In a live video keynote, Julian Assange engaged two packed rooms of over 1000 people on this challenge that started with a panel where myself and Ditlev Bredahl of OnApp engaged the very people responsible for delivering honest services and security.
Responsible for over half of the Internet users worldwide, Hosters, Telco’s and value-added resellers deliver value biggest challenge to the further hijacking of the Internet by the over-the-top Giants. And as Julian said, “the NSA invests $350M a year to undermine the infrastructure that Hosters rely on,” the time for honest business models and products we can value and trust, is really upon us. Business models from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and others — who control a vast amount of peoples’ data online through ‘free’ services – depend on our data to make money and now come into question as their exploitative business models become painfully obvious.
The opportunity for hosting companies is in capitalizing on this lack of trust and become partners in building a safe harbor – a secure, private, open Internet. People want to trust their service provider, and equally require tools that are simple, accessible and convenient to use. This additional challenge for the industry – making it easy for ordinary users to set up and manage their own encrypted communication and data – is a next step to pushing back on the state of surveillance. Julian Assange brought it right to the point when he mused that…Russia is blamed for annexing Crimea; but the US has basically annexed the whole world via the Internet.
At Open-Xchange, we develop products that address this head on and ruthlessly open, from a business model and technology perspective. And as we announced last month, we are doing this with great partners like Voiceworks. You’ll have the chance to meet with OX and Voiceworks on April 28th at the Telco Cloud World Forum in Munich.
Stop by our booth and discover more on the technology Julian Assange spoke to during WorldHostingDays, His interview was powered by OX Messenger which will deliver — to partners who have deployed OX App Suite — their own real time communications tool users will simply love. I look forward to sharing with you just how powerful this addition to the OX portfolio will be to open your hosting or Telco business up to new revenue streams. As we like to say back at the office: “the future of secure communications is wide open.”