Sir Tim Berners-Lee launches 'Magna Carta for the web' to save internet from abuse
Sir Tim Berners-Lee launches 'Magna Carta for the web' to
save internet from abuse
Laurence Dodds The Telegraph • November 5, 2018
Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched a "Magna Carta for
the web", warning that tech giants must change their ways to save the
online world from the dangerous forces they have unleashed.
Sir Tim, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989, called
for a "revolution" in how the internet is regulated and monetised in
order to stem abuse, political polarisation and fake news.
The 63-year-old was speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon
to launch a new "contract for the web" which asks internet companies
to uphold a set of principles such as protecting privacy and being transparent
about their algorithms.
Facebook and Google have backed the contract, which will
be agreed in detail next year, despite both companies being mentioned by its
creator as examples of how "the web we know and love" is under
threat.
Sir Tim said: "For the first 15 years, most people
just expected the web to do great things. They thought 'there'll be good and
bad, that is humanity, but if you connect humanity with technology, great
things will happen....
"What could go wrong? Well, duh: all kinds of things
have gone wrong since. We have fake news, we have problems with privacy, we
have problems with abuse of personal data, we have people being profiled in a
way that they can be manipulated by clever ads."
Sir Tim, who developed the Web as a "side
project" while working at the Cern research laboratory in Switzerland in
the Eighties, has become increasingly vocal about what he sees as a perversion
of his original vision.
He recently warned that tech giants such as Amazon and
Google may have to be broken up in order to prevent them from amassing too much
power, and has launched a project to decentralise data storage.
“I am disappointed with the current state of the Web. We
have lost the feeling of individual empowerment and to a certain extent also I
think the optimism has cracked," he told Reuters.
The new contract has been developed by the World Wide Web
Foundation, which Sir Tim founded, to mark the imminent moment at which half of
the world's population will be online. Other supporters include Richard
Branson, Gordon Brown, the French government and the cybersecurity firm
Cloudflare.
A key goal is to expand cheap internet into the third
world, where users pay up to nine times more for a single gigabyte of data,
relative to their incomes, than they do in North America or Europe.
Standing with Sir Tim on stage, Jacqueline Fuller,
Google's head of philanthropy, said: "We think the best way to deal with
these challenges is to come together collectively and work together
collaboratively... we're very supportive of the new contract."
But some of its principles may be difficult for tech
companies to honour. For example, the Foundation criticised companies that
harvest people's data without their knowledge or consent, citing allegations
that Google has been recording location data from Android users even when they
have turned location history off.
In its section about online bullying and abuse, it
mentions Facebook's alleged role in spreading violence in Burma and India. It
also asks companies to "ensure governments respect people's rights
online", even though Google has faced an internal revolt over plans to
build a censored search engine for Chinese users.
It also pointedly asks signatories to uphold net
neutrality, the idea of treating all internet traffic equally, across the whole
world. Both Google and Facebook have defended net neutrality in the USA, but
Facebook's "free basics" internet service for the third world has
been banned in India because it only allows users to access approved products.
Nevertheless, Mr Berners-Lee said he was optimistic about
the future of the internet. "The ad-based funding model doesn't have to
work in the same way. It doesn't have to create clickbait. It doesn't have to
be that you only get a programming job in order to distract your users from
what they want to do," he said.
"These people are going to step back and they're
going to put aside all the myths that they're currently taking as just being
part of the way things work... people like you, who are actually building the
web, taking things into their own hands."
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