Transcript: Remarks for Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman

Good afternoon. It’s good to be with you. Thank you, Rose, for your introduction and for all of the work that the Freedom Online Coalition is doing.

It is fitting to be here at the Atlantic Council for this event, because your mission sums up our purpose perfectly: “shaping the global future together.”

That is our fundamental charge in the field of technology and democracy—how we use modern innovations to forge a better future.

That’s what the DFR Lab strives to achieve through your research and advocacy. That’s what the Freedom Online Coalition, its members, observers, and Advisory Network seek to accomplish through our work. Thank you for your partnership.

More than five decades ago—seems like a long time ago, but really, very short—the internet found its origins in the form of the first online message ever sent—all of two letters in length, delivered from a professor at UCLA to colleagues at Stanford.

It was part of a project conceived in university labs and facilitated by government. It was an effort meant to test the outer limits of rapidly evolving technologies and tap into the transformative power of swiftly growing computer networks.

What these pioneers intended, at the time, was actually to devise a system that could allow people to communicate in the event of a nuclear attack or another catastrophic event.

Yet what they created changed everything. How we live and work. How we participate in our economy and our politics. How we organize movements. How we consume media, read books, order groceries, pay bills, run businesses, conduct research, learn, write, and do nearly anything we can think of.

Change didn’t happen overnight, of course, and that change came with both promise and peril.

This was a remarkable feat of scientific discovery, and it upended life as we know it, for better and sometimes worse. Over the years, as we went from search engines to social media, we started to face complicated questions, as leaders, as parents and grandparents, as members of the global community.

Questions about how the internet can best be utilized; how it should be governed; who might misuse it; how it impacts our children’s mental and emotional…