Stephen Balkam’s Opening Remarks – EU Forum 2025

We titled this gathering, “The Philosophy, Policy, and Practice of Online Safety” and we have gathered an extraordinary collection of experts and practitioners from across government, industry, the nonprofit sector and academia to help us address each of these three Ps. 

I’d like, in particular, to highlight the philosophical underpinnings of our collective work – whichever sector you are in. We use terms like transparency, openness, inclusiveness, empowerment, trust and safety. Each of these arise from a rich soil of Enlightenment thinking, rational thought or pragmatism. 

These are the traits that have long been associated with the American experiment, though they are being sorely tested by the dominant political voices and trends in the US. We have political nihilism on the one hand and extreme libertarian techno-optimism on the other. Neither sit well with what we in the West have grown used to as part of the post-War political consensus that gave rise to the Internet in the first place.  

That includes the set of values that helped to create governance structures – both formal and informal – that have (mostly) dealt with the extraordinary growth of this new medium. For 30 years we have tried to find the balance between allowing innovation while also mitigating against the worst of the web. 

We have often failed. But there are remarkable success stories, some of which we will explore in our discussions today.

I invite each of you to bring your conscious intention to this physical space as well as the virtual space we are sharing with folks online. And to bring your own set of personal and collective philosophies to bear on the discussions that follow. 

So I’d like to invite our first panel who, themselves, represent the flowering of rational and pragmatic governance of this once unruly and lawless medium.