Safe Internet Alliance

[This is the third in a series of posts featuring key points and issues discussed at Safe Internet Alliance’s event on Capitol Hill on October 20th, “Framework For A Safe Internet: Know the facts, understand the issues, shape the future.”]

Speaking on Panel 1, titled, "The Real Online Picture: Perspectives on Users, Providers and Safety," Yahoo Senior Director of Federal Government Relations Leslie Dunlap provided some interesting statistics on how its users engage with the company's site.

"Yahoo has over 158 million unique users every month to our site," she said. "There are only 196 million Internet users in the US, and so we reach over 80%. In the US, people spend more time on Yahoo than any other site, nearly 4-and-a-half hours a month."

Different age and gender demographics use different sections of the site more often. For instance, users 18 to 24 flock to the sports and auto sections, with a high level of male participation on Yahoo Answers. Chief household officers -- typically females in family households -- are much more active on entertainment, food, and health sections and less active on sports and auto properties.

Boomers, age 45 to 64, are active on groups, weather, and finance and less active on answers, sports, and entertainment.

"We've evolved as a network of sites," Dunlap said. "We've become more social. We see that today the web offers absolutely overwhelming choice. Before, people couldn't find anything, and now people want their stuff whenever they want it, wherever they are. Rather than having your PC at home, you want to be able to get things on the go."

She said that two major focuses for Yahoo now are openness and user generated content. Recently, Yahoo has opened itself up to third party applications that are regularly featured on its home page. She explained that through an open API, engineers have been able to build platforms not owned by her company.

"Of course licensing and copyright issues come into play," Dunlap said. "Our specific responses to those issues have been mostly in the safety realm, with privacy policies and safe searching."

The user generated content also offers unique challenges. About 500 million people worldwide come to Yahoo every month, and she pointed out that some of those people "won't do the right thing. If we were going to police people all the time we wouldn't be able to offer those services."

The question, she said, is who has liability for that? And how can they help people going after the abusers to get what they need? She said that Yahoo is one of the first companies to come up with "report abuse" buttons, and that this gives users more power than ever before.

Dunlap was followed by Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, who spoke about the changing demographics of the web as more users migrate online, particularly with mobile technology.

"Today, about 60% of the people of the world have a mobile device of some kind," he said. "Five years from now the entry point to the global network will be the equivalent of an iPhone today. There are about 1 billion who have traditional internet access but we're on a track where if you project forward, 90% will have the equivalent of an iPhone in 10 years. We're going to see more people connected than ever before."

Rosenberg said that the reason he thinks Twitter has exploded is because it was built to operate on a mobile device, and that more traditional sites like Yahoo and Myspace are having a hard time transitioning to these simple devices.

He told an anecdote of when he gave his 8-year-old son an iPod Touch, not realizing that he had WiFi in his home and was basically giving his son around-the-clock access to the Internet. His son has also told him that most of his fourth grade friends all have their own cell phones, and Rosenberg predicted that within a few years most children as young as the third grade will have phones just as capable as today's iPhone, meaning near universal Internet access.

"Part of what the challenge is for all of us is that the Internet is not going to be something that's easily policed and maintained as more and more people get on," he concluded. "How we protect the innovation part while also keeping it safe is going to be one of the great public policy challenges of our time."