interview The Mozilla Foundation has changed its look, but its goals remain the same – supporting an internet that’s open and inclusive, and that prioritizes the interests of people over corporations.
Yet the rebranding of the foundation in August, and of its subsidiary Mozilla Corporation last December, reflects internal changes at organizations looking to redefine themselves, to shake off setbacks, and to reassert their relevance at a time of rapid technological and political transition.
Last May, Nabiha Syed became executive director of The Mozilla Foundation, and a year on, reached out to The Register to share her vision for an organization humbled by layoffs and confronted by stochastic parrots and stochastic politics.
Syed said that the Mozilla Foundation is sworn to defend the open web and has been doing so for the past two decades. But the challenge is different now.
“We sort of knew what the internet was and it went through phases,” said Syed. “But now, with the onslaught of AI slop and surveillance capitalism running amok, we really have to go back to first principles: why do we care about the open internet, the open web?”
The opportunity for the foundation, she said, is to rethink what a positive future looks like and to figure out how to mobilize people to help realize that vision, because change requires community participation.
From browser to social to GenAI
Syed sees AI as the next frontier of our digital lives. The continuum of mediating technologies began with the browser, then shifted toward social media, and has migrated to generative AI models.
“The throughline is it’s artificial to define the internet as something in a browser or something in a social web feed or AI,” she explained. “They’re all part of a digital experience.”
What matters, said Syed, is remaining committed to the foundation’s values, to “making sure that public benefit and private enrichment are in balance, that we’re centering human beings. Because who cares about the technology? It’s about the human experience of technology and what it unleashes in terms of our creativity and our connectedness. That’s what matters. That’s in our manifesto and has been consistent. And so that’s the lens to bring to AI.”
AI, Syed argued, has tremendous benefits to help people communicate with one another, through translation and transcription tools, for example. At the same time, she said, it could allow power to be centralized in the hands of the few.
The Mozilla Foundation aims to focus on the intersection of those concerns, on advocacy, on legislation, on creative engagements to help people.
As an example of the foundation’s work, Syed pointed to Common Voice, datasets of text and speech in different languages that can be used to train machine learning models for applications like speech recognition.
“It was rooted in a very simple, imaginative idea,” explained Syed. “Anyone should be able to engage in their own language in their digital lives, and they should be able to create in that language.”
Knowing that the market would create data sets in widely spoken languages like Mandarin, English, French, and Spanish, but might not be so attentive to languages like Flemish, Catalan, and Sindhi, the Mozilla Foundation helped assemble the data.
The result, she said, is the world’s largest crowdsourced open data set of languages, used by companies like Meta and Nvidia and by activists building chatbots to sell sweet potatoes to neighbors who don’t speak the same dialect of Kinyarwanda.
Looking ahead, Syed said the foundation is taking a similar approach as part of an initiative to build a data collective. She describes it as a marketplace that will allow those with rich data sets to offer that data in a controlled manner, as opposed to just posting it for the taking.
“If you happen to have a data set that you’ve cultivated carefully about biodiversity in the Amazon, and you want people to be able to find it, but also to contact you to license it … there isn’t currently a way to do that,” Syed said. “We are building it.”
Fighting for openness in the Trump era
The Mozilla Foundation’s stated mission, “[ensuring] the internet remains open, inclusive, and equitable,” looks a lot more fraught under the Trump administration, which has been trying to purge two of those words from federal documents.
Syed acknowledges that reality but sees room to maneuver.
“I think that Washington’s position is effectively, extremely pro-business, which is to be expected,” she said. “And ours is pro-human, which is not anti-business.”
The Mozilla Foundation, she contends, can help strike that balance by bringing all voices to the table.
“There is an opportunity to remind this administration and governments around the world that they need to have a nuanced take on how they can create an actually pro-innovation environment for everybody, not just for a few companies that have really deep lobbying budgets,” she said.
If she had her way and could conjure legislation into reality, Syed said she’d wish for laws on data access and data transparency, as well as meaningful open source for AI, not just open model weights.
“In 2024, people were using ChatGPT to help with their scheduling and maybe auto-write some emails,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is that people are using it for therapy, for companionship, for helping with grief.
“Those are the most human of interactions. To say that no one but the companies will have access to the data to assess how that actually works, what that does to our cognitive load, what that does to our loneliness, that’s untenable. I refuse to accept a universe in which we just trust self-interested parties with our mental health.”
Privacy remains a concern for The Mozilla Foundation, and is one that Syed knows well from her prior work overseeing an investigative publication called The Markup that focused on privacy concerns.
While the likes of Google and Meta have been throwing privacy under the bus for decades for the sake of ad revenue, Syed sees signs of innovation in initiatives like Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project.
What’s more, she contends that things may have finally gotten bad enough for people to demand privacy.
One of the reasons, she said, that privacy hasn’t been prioritized was that not everyone saw the risk.
“I would argue that what’s happening in the environment now is that the risk is palpable,” she said.
The notion of an authoritarian state that wants to penalize people for activities that would be normal in a free society is no longer a distant fear, she said.
“So, in many ways, I think it creates the demand for a lot of these interventions and the ability to advocate for them,” Syed explained, adding that while the US may not presently be receptive to these concerns, Europe is responding.
Asked what gives her hope or most inspires her these days, Syed replied, “Every day I talk to people who look at what is happening on the internet and they’re like, ‘No thanks. I actually don’t want to fall in love with a chatbot, and I don’t want my kid to only have a robot teacher, and I don’t want to be followed around everywhere on the web. I want something different, and I’m willing to put in the work to do it.'”
Syed said she recalls when she was one of the attorneys representing The Guardian when it reported on the documents revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of global surveillance. She assumed the revelations would change people’s behavior with regard to privacy, but that didn’t happen.
“It didn’t change behavior,” she said. “What I’m seeing now, the signals I’m seeing now, are people very concretely saying, ‘I’m willing to change my behavior.’ And that’s when real change happens.” ®
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