"Fixing the Web" with Jeff Jaffe, Brewster Kahle and Steven Gordon

On 14 July 2017, W3C CEO Jeff Jaffe (MIT '76) was featured as part of an MIT Alumni Association Panel "Fixing the Web" with Brewster Kahle, ('82) Founder and Digital Librarian, Internet Archive and Steven Gordon ('75), Professor of IT Management, Babson College.

When talking about the history of the Web and Tim Berners-Lee, Jeff noted that after its invention:

"He created a consortium called the W3C so that everyone who was interested in enhancing the web technology base can work together collaboratively."

Jeff added about W3C:

"Most of our work recently has been transforming the web from being a large database of static information to dynamic information; a web of application where people build web applications which work essentially as distributed applications across multiple systems, making sure that we address societal problems such as web accessibility for people that have challenges or security privacy issues."

The panel was moderated by science Journalist Barbara Moran, and the topics were wide ranging and interesting - from the Internet Archive, to government control of the Web, advertising, social media, innovation and more.

In the discussion, a question was raised from Twitter about the EME standard:

Jeff noted:

We’ve developed a new proposed standard called EME, Encrypted Media Extensions, that instead of displaying these movies to hundreds of millions of people in an insecure and privacy violating fashion, we've built it in a way that makes it secure for people to watch movies.

Please watch the video if you'd like to see more.