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As the Web Turns 25, Sir Tim Berners-Lee Calls For A Web Magna Carta
Today marks the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's "Information
Management: A Proposal," containing the ideas that led to the
World Wide Web. From its humble beginnings as a way to store linked
documents at CERN to... well, you're reading this now. To celebrate, the
W3C is encouraging
people to post their birthday greetings. Quoting Tim Berners-Lee:
"In the following quarter-century, the Web has changed the world in ways that I never could have imagined. There have been many exciting advances. It has generated billions of dollars in economic growth, turned data into the gold of the 21st century, unleashed innovation in education and healthcare, whittled away geographic and social boundaries, revolutionised the media, and forced a reinvention of politics in many countries by enabling constant two-way dialogue between the rulers and the ruled."
Martin S. and JestersGrind both wrote in to note that Tim
Berners-Lee is calling for the creation of a Web Magna Carta. Again Quoting Tim Berners-Lee "It's time for
us to make a big communal decision," he said. "In front of us are two
roads - which way are we going to go? Are we going to continue on the
road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more
control - more and more surveillance? Or are we going to set up a
bunch of values? Are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta
for the world wide web and say, actually, now it's so important, so
much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human
rights?"
How has the rise of the web affected your life? Also check out the CERN line mode browser simulation of the first web site.
I got tired of him when he endorsed DRM. That would be rule 1 and 2 for my web Magna Carta: No DRM.
Nice idea but to get the original Magna Carta signed took a rebellion, and getting it accepted meant overthrowing the king. I don't accept the NSA, GCHQ, etc. to just accept this one either!
that it becomes on a level with human rights?
Online rights are already on level with human rights. i.e.: ignored by governments, cried about by NGOs, impossible to defend, trampled upon with no consequence, ...
I mean... We did already agree that torturing and killing people was bad, right?
Therefore its a meaningless gesture and nothing more than a publicity stunt for the anniversary.
And equating it to human rights is an insult to all the people in the world currently having their rights abused or taken away completely. Oddly enough billions of people manage to live quite fulfilled lives without going near a web browser. The same can't be said for those being oppressed ,tortured, starved or massacred. While I respect Berners-Lee, I think he's lost a bit of perspective on things.
I was born in 1989 ^_^
today more people realize that it is better to be free than "the ruled".
Nonsense. People are reactionary and fickle, and irrational. Most people don't want freedom. They want order and structure, and they don't care about whose toes they have to step on to get it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Thanks for fucking up the Internet.
He certainly did - Just like Ford fucked up the roads by making cars cheap enough so that almost anyone could have one.
Once Jim Clarke and Bill Gates had their "broswers wars", orderly development of web was thrown out of the window by the money chase. This may not have been bad. You now had hundreds of thousands trying out new ideas. Even though 99% there were some gems in the successful 1%.
Why? Why *should* he do things he doesn't enjoy as much, just because you think he *should* enjoy them more?
If I lost the internet, I don't even know what I would do with my time. (If I lost web access it would be *literally* like losing the tv, since I watch all my tv online. Also like losing all my gaming consoles, half my library, not to mention would seriously impact my ability to get any work done, since most documentation is online these days.)
And yes, I also found my wife online - technically we met in real-life first, but then reconnected a couple years later online. If that hadn't happened, we would never have gotten together.
of their wealthiest citizens. This is especially true in the United States. Now imagine how much more difficult it would have been to invade Iraq and steal their oil if the citizens of both the U.S. and Iraq routinely communicated, like over the web. Then the citizens of the aggressor would feel the pain of the thefts their government engages in . . . and might even go so far as to oppose them.
Opposing wars is a direct attack on the profits of both government minions and the wealthy who buy them. Therefore, the web must be controlled.
It really is as simple as that, and if you are truely patriotic for humanity, you will fight this trend as hard as you can.
well, an unnecessary abstraction layer in internetworked computing conjured out of thin air by Euro academics for essentially marketing purposes...that hasn't really done jack sh*t for me
now..."the internet"...that's pretty much changed every aspect of my life in some way or another...
December 9th 1968...**that's** the internet's birthday!
Thank you Dave Raggett
How about the following:
1) Tell the NSA to GTFO. They are officially ban hammered.
2) The government, ISPs, MAFIAAs, etc. keep their damned hands off the internet. Any attempt to meddle with it gains them a horse whipping that gets televised for the whole world to see.
3) Any ISP getting a hair-brained notion to do crap like "two-tiered" internet gets everybody from the CEO down to the janitor horse whipped. Severely. On Television.
4) Everybody and anybody can get internet and has more than one ISP to chose from. If an ISP has a monopoly, they either get a competitor or get a horse whipping that puts the one in #3 to shame every day until they do. Televised, of course.
no no no, everyone knows rule 2 is "???"
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Why do people seem to think governments are the only threat to our rights in this space?
Large corporations already watch and log everything they can about you. Not just your metadata, but what you do (deep packet inspection), where you are (location-based services), what you buy (sharing all your transactions with "affiliates"), and what you say (facebook messages, etc).
What's worse, this data is all legally their property (at least in the U.S.), so they can basically do whatever they want with it, sell it, store it, give it to the government in exchange for favors, or worse. AFAIK, you cant even demand to see what they are keeping on file for you.
Their capabilities are not just passive, either. They can control what services you can access (now that net neutrality is dead), gouge you financially with little justification (credit ratings are based on proprietary algorithms), open you to barrages of advertisement, trick you into legal commitments you dont understand (do you have $500 to have a lawyer review that EULA?), and guess what? Government provides all the tools to enforce all of this. And you pay for ALL of it.
As long as we are using analogies from EU history, the government is a neutered king who lives far away and you rarely feel his presence. Big Business is the nobility who owns all the land, controls all the food, hoards all the money, and controls your life on a day-to-day basis. Like an indentured servant, you have no choice to participate and hand over most of the fruits of your labor. What are you going to do - stop buying things and stop having a job?
I'll head off one criticism of what I'm saying. This is not conspiracy theory, because there is no conspiracy necessary. This is a system, and most of what I've said above is just legal fact.
Unlike your government, you can not participate in corporate governance, you can't request meeting minutes under FOIA, internal rules and policies are rarely published. You have no voice except your dollars (and many industries are so anticompetitive you really have little choice).
Maybe big business has all this opportunity but doesnt take advantage of it. Do you think so?
I meant "my life would be much, much smaller and poorer" in a few ways. The obvious use of "poorer" is that I wouldn't have the job I have now. No need for a web developer if the web didn't exist! (Yes, I'd be doing something else. Likely with computers, but who knows if I'd enjoy it as much as I enjoy web development.)
Also, my world would literally be smaller. I'd know my tiny circle of "In Real Life" friends/co-workers/family and that would be it. Given the small geographic area that all of us occupy, our life experiences are somewhat the same. Yes, there are variations, but nothing too radical. Online, however, I converse with people from across the United States, Canada, Australia, etc. If I'm discussing an issue, I can get viewpoints from people who have much different life experiences and who live in many different situations. This also means that we can compare reportings of world events. If TV news reports here say that X happened, reports in France say that Y happened, and reports from Japan say Z happened, we can all get together to try to figure out the truth. (Or at least cut through some of the spin that news programs love to add.) All of this inter-connectedness adds richness to my life, so my life would be poorer were the Internet to disappear.
Finally, the Internet has enabled me to connect with people based on interests instead of based on geographic location. Growing up, I knew only one other person who liked science fiction even remotely as much as I did. I can't even begin to count the number of people I've met online who share my interests. What's more, the Internet has enabled me to pursue new interests. I wanted to try making a fez for a Doctor Who costume so I looked up some tutorials, found a blog with detailed templates/photos/descriptions, and made my own fez. It came out so good that my Whovian kids wanted their own. I even connected with the blog's author to thank her. Without the Internet, I wouldn't have known how to do this at all. At best, I might have found a magazine article with some limited instructions... after much searching... if my library felt the need to stock that particular issue of that particular magazine.
Then there's the fact that I communicate a whole lot better online than face-to-face. (Asperger's Syndrome + social pressure to say the right thing at just the right moment = poor face-to-face conversation skills. Constantly working on it, but I'm much better communicating via writing.) Actually, in many ways, communicating with people online has helped me communicate better with people face-to-face since I can remember how I responded to something online and draw upon that in a face-to-face discussion.
The Internet is a big part of my life in many different ways and I wouldn't want to go back to life without it.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"--- You must be this intelligent to ride the internet."
Let's us get this straight:
Web Magna Carta