21 May 2014 / Washington Post – The investor and Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen thinks we’ll all look back in 20 years and conclude that Bitcoin was as influential a platform for innovation as the Internet itself was. He says that tech companies think their meetings with President Obama on privacy are a waste of time. And he calls net neutrality a “lose-lose.” In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post this week, Andreessen painted a picture of a future that’s distributed, messy and fraught with tension. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.
Is there anything that Washington has built a wall against in terms of progress?
Well, the big thing right now for the tech industry is the Snowden revelations, and the consequences of that for the American tech industry. Specifically, in two areas: One is that the level of trust that customers have [in] American tech companies has been seriously damaged. And that is especially — but not exclusively — true outside the United States. Every time another revelation comes out, like the one this weekend about hijacking the routers on their way out of the country, or the one about hacking into the Internet companies’ backbone networks — every time one of these shoes drops, and apparently there is just an unlimited number of shoes — every time one of these things happens, it’s a serious blow to the credibility of these companies, especially outside the U.S. And so there’s a really big, I mean very, very, very high level of concern in the Valley that the American tech industry is in trouble outside the U.S….. Read more
