Revelations about governments’ online snooping have been good news for Gabriel Weinberg, builder of DuckDuckGo – a search engine that doesn’t track its users

What made you set up ?
I started it a little over five years ago, just intending to build a better search engine. My initial focus was to reduce spam and prevent irrelevant sites from coming up in links, and also to make better instant answers. A lot of times you want stuff from Wikipedia, so that was the first place I tried to give you an answer from. After I launched, I started getting questions about search privacy. When I investigated, I decided I didn’t want to store data.

Why didn’t you want to track your users?
Google has been pretty transparent about , to their credit. I thought that would be inevitable if we store data. Also, it’s just kind of creepy for the search engine to know so much about you. You have your most personal relationship on the internet with the search engine – medical queries, where you’re going, all tied back to one person. That’s the case even more now; infrastructure in tracking people online has exploded in the last five years.

Internet companies make money by selling user data to advertisers. How do you make a profit if you don’t collect data?
It’s a myth that Google needs to track users to make money on web search. The vast majority – 99 per cent – of the money in web search is based on keyword matching. If you type in “car” you get a car ad. We make money the same way.

Who uses your search engine?
Different people prefer different experiences and user interfaces. Google is trying to appeal to the average user. We are trying to carve out a niche for the serious person who knows what they’re doing and wants their privacy protected and a great result. We have servers around the world, and we can see how much traffic is coming in from which areas, so we know our users are about 50 per cent US, 50 per cent international. We also do surveys, which show that about half our users come in after reading about us in the press. What the story was about varies – privacy, instant answers, or just, “Check this out, it’s cool”. The rest find out about us through word of mouth.

Are you still improving the search engine?
We are focusing more on instant answers. When you do a search, the answer often exists on a particular site. The big ones are obvious: movies are IMDB, for restaurants you might want Yelp. But when you get into more obscure queries, you really don’t know what that site is. It’s our job to figure that out and give you an answer quickly. That requires two things: classification and plug-ins to give you the data in the right format. We are recruiting open source developers to make those plug-ins.

Have the revelations about the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) monitoring programme affected your traffic?
We were close to 2 million queries a day before the NSA story broke. Since then, . We’ve broken records.

This article will appear in print under the headline “One minute with… Gabriel Weinberg”

WHO runs the internet? For the past 30 years, pretty much no one. Some governments might call this a bug, but to the engineers who designed the protocols, standards, naming and numbering systems of the internet, it’s a feature.

The goal was to build a network that could withstand damage and would enable the sharing of information. In that, they clearly succeeded – hence the oft-repeated line from John Gilmore, founder of digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” These pioneers also created a robust platform on which a guy in a dorm room could build a business that serves a billion people.

But perhaps not for much longer. This week, 2000 people have gathered for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to discuss, in part, whether they should be in charge.

The stated goal of the Dubai meeting is to update the obscure International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), last revised in 1988. These relate to the way international telecom providers operate. In charge of this process is the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency set up in 1865 with the advent of the telegraph. Its $200 million annual budget is mainly funded by membership fees from 193 countries and about 700 companies. Civil society groups are only represented if their governments choose to include them in their delegations. Some do, some don’t. This is part of the controversy: the WCIT is effectively a closed shop.

Vinton Cerf, Google’s chief internet evangelist and co-inventor of the TCP/IP internet protocols, that decisions in Dubai “have the potential to put government handcuffs on the net”.

The need to update the ITRs isn’t surprising. Consider what has happened since 1988: the internet, Wi-Fi, broadband, successive generations of mobile telephony, international data centres, cloud computing. In 1988, there were a handful of telephone companies – now there are thousands of relevant providers.

Controversy surrounding the WCIT gathering has been building for months. In May, 30 digital and human rights organisations from all over the world wrote to the ITU with three demands: first, that it publicly release all preparatory documents and proposals; second, that it open the process to civil society; and third that it ask member states to solicit input from all interested groups at national level. In June, two academics at George Mason University in Virginia – Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado – set up the site, soliciting copies of the WCIT documents and posting those they received. There were still gaps in late November when , a consultancy firm and ITU member, broke ranks and posted the lot on its own site.

The issue entered the mainstream when Greenpeace and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) launched the campaign, demanding that the WCIT be opened up to outsiders. At the launch of the campaign on 12 November, Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the ITUC, pledged to fight for as long it took to ensure an open debate on whether regulation was necessary. “We will stay the distance,” she said.

This marks the first time that such large, experienced, international campaigners, whose primary work has nothing to do with the internet, have sought to protect its freedoms. This shows how fundamental a technology the internet has become.

A week later, the European parliament passed a resolution stating that the ITU was “not the appropriate body to assert regulatory authority over either internet governance or internet traffic flows”, opposing any efforts to extend the ITU’s scope and insisting that its human rights principles took precedence. The US has always argued against regulation.

Efforts by ITU secretary general Hamadoun Touré to spread calm have largely failed. In October, that extending the internet to the two-thirds of the world currently without access required the UN’s leadership. Elsewhere, he has repeatedly claimed that the more radical proposals on the table in Dubai would not be passed because they would require consensus.

These proposals raise two key fears for digital rights campaigners. The first concerns censorship and surveillance: some nations, such as Russia, favour regulation as a way to control or monitor content transiting their networks.

The second is financial. Traditional international calls attract settlement fees, which are paid by the operator in the originating country to the operator in the terminating country for completing the call. On the internet, everyone simply pays for their part of the network, and ISPs do not charge to carry each other’s traffic. These arrangements underpin network neutrality, the principle that all packets are delivered equally on a “best efforts” basis. Regulation to bring in settlement costs would end today’s free-for-all, in which anyone may set up a site without permission. Small wonder that Google is one of the most vocal anti-WCIT campaigners.

How worried should we be? Well, the ITU cannot enforce its decisions, but, as was pointed out at the Stop the Net Grab launch, the system is so thoroughly interconnected that there is plenty of scope for damage if a few countries decide to adopt any new regulatory measures.

This is why so many people want to be represented in a dull, lengthy process run by an organisation that may be outdated to revise regulations that can be safely ignored. If you’re not in the room you can’t stop the bad stuff.

“This meeting is effectively a closed shop. If you’re not in the room, you can’t stop the bad stuff”