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As We Forge the Web of Tomorrow, We Need a Set of Guiding Principles That Can Define the Kind of Web We Want, Says Tim Berners-Lee (nytimes.com)
Tim Berners-Lee, writing for The New York Times: All technologies come with risks. We drive cars despite the possibility of serious accidents. We take prescription drugs despite the danger of abuse and addiction. We build safeguards into new innovations so we can manage the risks while benefiting from the opportunities. The web is a global platform -- its challenges stretch across borders and cultures. Just as the web was built by millions of people collaborating around the world, its future relies on our collective ability to make it a better tool for everyone.
As we forge the web of tomorrow, we need a set of guiding principles that can define the kind of web we want. Identifying these will not be easy -- any agreement that covers a diverse group of countries, cultures and interests will never be. But I believe it's possible to develop a set of basic ideals that we can all agree on, and that will make the web work better for everyone, including the 50 percent of the world's population that has yet to come online.
Governments, companies and individuals all have unique roles to play. The World Wide Web Foundation, an organization I founded in 2009 to protect the web as a public good, has drawn up a set of core principles outlining the responsibilities that each party has to protect a web that serves all of humanity. We're asking everyone to sign on to these principles and join us as we create a formal Contract for the Web in 2019. The principles specify that governments are responsible for connecting their citizens to an open web that respects their rights.
As we forge the web of tomorrow, we need a set of guiding principles that can define the kind of web we want. Identifying these will not be easy -- any agreement that covers a diverse group of countries, cultures and interests will never be. But I believe it's possible to develop a set of basic ideals that we can all agree on, and that will make the web work better for everyone, including the 50 percent of the world's population that has yet to come online.
Governments, companies and individuals all have unique roles to play. The World Wide Web Foundation, an organization I founded in 2009 to protect the web as a public good, has drawn up a set of core principles outlining the responsibilities that each party has to protect a web that serves all of humanity. We're asking everyone to sign on to these principles and join us as we create a formal Contract for the Web in 2019. The principles specify that governments are responsible for connecting their citizens to an open web that respects their rights.
Now that Microsoft is using google's web-browser engine, google, and google alone, will decide the future of the web.
How many countries use government-run ISPs? How is this going to reverse the trend of the centralized Web becoming hosted on only a few domains? How is this going to combat the current trend of "de-platforming" where third parties cut off access due to public outcry?
1. Porn Wants to Be Free
2.
OK, that's all I got so far.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just make sure that it's open and accessible for anyone who wants to have a presence even if there are others in opposition to that presence. You're not going to be able to please everyone and there are plenty of governments, industries, or other groups that are only interested in control and appeasing them in any way will ensure that you've only really created a tool with which they can abuse or enslave humanity.
And anyone who says otherwise is simply not paying attention. Wrong think? Not on the "Web We Want"! What defines "Wrong Think?" Well don't worry. We'll tell you when you think wrongly.
Many of us envision a web as a place to share ideas, to discuss them, to tear them down, to dissect them, so the best ideas can come forward. You can no longer do that. It's not even the "KKK Neo Nazi Fascist Scum" that is being deplatformed, banned. It's the average user because they said some mean words, or the comedian who said something offensive 10 years ago, as comedians often do. When you start banning the extreme, but legally protected speech, everyone is next and we're at that point.
And while everyone is increasingly starting to have these "WTF" moments, at the same time they keep asking for more of it. After all, it's the "Web We Want".
Nicknames only.
they're too inflexible and clever wordsmiths can twist them into evil things. Better to layout a set of goals and work towards them. Yeah, I know there's a fine line there, and you have to be careful to avoid getting trapped by "end justify means" but focusing on goals instead of principles yields better & concrete results.
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Well that would make reading the news online really difficult because that deal with real people and their real names. Also, with people uploading photographs of others/themselves, names become somewhat of a moot point. You could argue it's their fault but at the same time, so is putting their real name.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The Web is not the Internet. If you don't like what the Web has become make something else that can run on the internet.
By default the internet should be content and platform agnostic. Those are the only "principles" needed for a computer network. If you want something more restrictive than that, you can make your own thing.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
What was once just a tool for communication has become a weapon, and citizens, governments, militaries, and criminals are all fighting for control of it.
Average people just want their email, watch movies, shopping, maybe a little research, and so on.
Governments want to control what flows over it, and the more authoritarian and dictatorial they are, the tighter they want to squeeze.
Governments also stupidly use it to connect all their important infrastructure control, which just makes it so much easier for terrorists and criminals to attack the things that the average person relies on for their day-to-day survival.
Financial institutions also stupidly connect themselves together with it -- which wouldn't be a problem, except they're so gods-be-damned stupid about it, that it seems a 12 year old child can break in and cause all sorts of havoc and mayhem.
Militaries use it as a weapon to attack other militaries and governments.
Criminals use it like a crowbar to break into companies to steal data, steal money, hold data hostage, and so on.
Terrorists use it to influence weak-minded people into becoming murdering monsters, and as a way to coordinate their attacks on soft targets (i.e. civilians).
Perhaps we don't deserve an Internet. Perhaps, like so many other technologies that started out bright and wonderful ideas, it's all Too Much Too Fast, evolving orders of magnitude faster than our poor Caveman selves have evolved our society and civilization, and We Can't Handle It -- therefore it gets twisted and abused and perverted, as we all see it's become.
At the rate things are going, we may not have an Internet at some point. It may all just fragment and collapse under the weight of all the corruption and misuse of the technology. ISPs may just divvy it up into the 'walled gardens' everyone is so afraid of, and even the highest, most expensive tiers of access will still have limits, controls, corporate censorship, and barriers against accessing anyone else's 'walled garden', that make it essentially useless. Governments, for all we know, may adopt Chinas' 'Great Firewall' model, picking and choosing what their citizens may and may not access, and watching every single byte sent like a hawk. Law enforcement, in their over-anxious drive to see and hear everything all the time without any barriers, may destroy all encryption for everyone, creating a utopia for criminals, who will be completely unfettered in committing cybercrime.
A 'free and open Internet'? Seems more and more unlikely, at least not the way it's being done now. There may need to be an 'Internet 2.0' (or 3.0, or 4.0, or whatever) that has nothing whatsoever to do with the current Internet infrastructure -- or they may try that, and have it quashed and made illegal by governments and corporations' lobbyists. Some talk of a 'mesh Internet', completely wireless. Some talk of expanding the 'dark web', and similar ideas -- but if all the above are made illegal, federal crimes, then are we all expected to become criminals? Do we go back to SneakerNet, and exchange ideas and data and entertainment via portable drives, delivered by hand from person to person?
Do we, as regular people, have enough of a voice to change these dystopian futures of the Internet? Are there enough of us, can we speak loudly and clearly enough, to make a difference? Are there too many average citizens who are complacent, or worse, apathetic, and those of us who would speak up would just be dismissed as fringe elements (or worse, as dissidents)?
What's the mechanism by which the Internet can be saved from possible dystopian futures? Is it technlogical? Or is it socio-political? Both? The answer is important.
I don't have answers. There's too many questions, and too many people involved. Who, really, is wise enough to have the right answers? Is this a problem for The Few, or for All?
Governments: stay out of regulating the Internet
Companies: stay into making a profit off it
Individuals: don't demand any of the above to do anything for you.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
"governments are responsible for connecting their citizens to an open web that respects their rights"
Yeah, Tim has gone full nuts.
Governments, companies and individuals all have unique roles to play.
And each wants something different from/for the Internet.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Normal people don't buy products and then pay again for no reason at all, so who cares what the web page says.
Tim Berners-Lee had the chance to set these guiding principles through a little organization called W3C. The problem is that he made the financial underpinning of the organization entirely business dependent and now it's little more than a rubber stamping operation for big business.
TL;DR: He had the opportunity to accomplish this and he blew it big time.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
World governments, if polled democratically, would likely vote against anything that is even remotely resembling democracy.
Not because governments are evil or anything other that silly. Just because most of the governments are not democratic (as we TBL means it), and view any movement by their people towards one as a threat. Evidence for this is ample across various "colour revolutions" to the current unrest in France.
Chinese internet model is likely the most desirable model for most of the world, if you ask their rulers.
Sir Tim.
Here's what I would want as a long-time professional web developer who initially was very sceptical of the Web and in some ways still is:
1.) DNS - Fix DNS. Distributed, with no single center of control. Conceptually "Namecoin" is the right approach. Use that or find something better.
2.) Offline - Make "offline" a first-class concept. This is where the Web sucks bit time, to this very day. In this regard Fidonet is still ahead of todays puplic Internet and the Web. And Fidonet is from 1989 or something. Make referrers optional for the *user*. Preferably with mesh-networking in the mix (this lies lower than the Web, I know, but still).
3.) Client-side Application Logic - Keep the Web primarily document based but offer a turing-complete application runtime environment as a well spec'd first-class solution. JavaScript actually isn't all that bad, but maybe there's a better way. Perhaps TypeScript or something similar. Canvas and timeline control should be a zero-fuss affair.
4.) Protocols - Clean out, streamline, simplify and fix HTML and CSS. Absolute sizes, no more pixels or PTs, completely independant of screen resolution. Zero-fuss layout control. Make encryption at application-protocl level a must. Make the specification more strict. Broken HTML? Errormessage.
That's what I would want and I think it would fix most problems we have today.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A rediscovery of the US freedoms would be a good start.
The ability to speak, publish, comment without a political "brand" saying they know a person has no right to "publish".
The freedom to talk about DRM.
To talk about how a nation is breaking encryption and to talk about what is published by whistleblowers.
To talk about how a VPN fail when a mil/gov wants to track its nations internet users.
The freedom to repair electronics and show repair work without been tracked for "counterfeiting".
To talk abut history, cults, faiths without blasphemy laws, nation laws and copyright preventing freedom of speech.
The ability to draw art, make music and publish cartoons about German, Spanish and French politics.
To publish without another nations "brand", think tank, political leadership, faith, cult, NGO, mil, gov, police, legal system able to block publication.
The ability to publish in the USA without consideration of the laws of a Communist Party in another nation.
The freedom to publish about a movie in terms of script quality, acting ability and politics in that movie. Without having an account removed.
To publish without having to consider the politics of a CEO. That any CEO with partisan political views can block all free speech and publication.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I believe it's possible to develop a set of basic ideals that we can all agree on
Really? Been binge-watching Hallmark Christmas movies, have you?
There are huge, powerful actors all over the world stage whose express plans for the Web are all about putting themselves at an advantage while putting those they consider their enemies / opponents / marks at a disadvantage. How the hell are they going to agree on 'basic ideals' when their fondest wishes are to subjugate and/or annihilate each other? Can you really see the Chinese government and the American government agreeing on any 'basic ideals' beyond those that give them more control over their respective populations?
You say "If we want a web that works for us, we must work for the web’s future." I say "If we want a web that works for us, we must work to curb corporate power and arrogance, and we must bring our own governments to heel by making them fear us, instead of us fearing them". Web woes are merely a symptom - it's the disease we need to be fighting.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The web is not the internet.
There are a large number of problems with the web (web, not internet) including;
Personally, I've come to the conclusion that the web will die, as soon as something better comes along.
LET IT DIE.
It's great and all, but instead of spending effort expanding it, changing it, and "protecting" it, work on creating something better.
If it's a 'free and open Internet except for Alex Jones, who we must "deplatform"', then it's not a 'free and open Internet'.
Unfortunately, the problems you talk about are just reflections of the wider society (and technology's impact upon it).
I recently ran across some websites on sustainable living, and I realized that we're doing it all wrong. As a society, we're not running at 100% efficiency, or even 50%, but likely less than 1% efficiency. Considering our current inefficiency, we could all be living a better-than-modern lifestyle with relatively little work (no more than 20-30 hours/week) and enjoy said work far more, all while minimizing our impact on the planet. It was truly an eye opener for me.
Don't get me wrong, the sustainability community has some half-baked ideas too, but after hearing some of them I can never see the world the same way again.
As a concrete example, modern western greenhouses are designed incredibly stupidly. They're impossible to insulate and lose their heat quickly at night, so they have to be propped up by burning fossil fuels to warm the greenhouse. This design only makes sense if labor is expensive and fossil fuel energy is cheap (even with cheap solar, it'd be better to utilize the solar directly). It also makes growing greenhouse crops incredibly risky, since by the time you're ready to harvest, you've already spent a ton of electricity on each crop and could lose it all if the crop fails due to a disease or some other problem. The better solution is to build a brick wall facing south and build the greenhouse on the south face of the wall. Over the day, the wall will soak up energy from the sun and radiate it back out at night. Brick walls are relatively cheap and simple and last a near eternity, and the wall doubles as protection against cold winds from the north and a serious insulating layer, so it makes an ideal energy storage system. Lastly, you can throw an insulating blanket over the greenhouse during the night to keep the warmth in even more effectively. At temperate latitudes, this creates an environment where you can grow temperature-sensitive crops all-year round without any heating, even in the depths of a midwestern winter (and at higher latitudes, it will drastically reduce the amount of heating required to sustain livable temperatures).
At first this might seem like a bit of trivia, perhaps only applicable to farmers. However, I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be applicable in a suburban setting. A greenhouse of this design about the same size as a typical midwestern suburban home can consistently feed dozens of people year-round. They are very popular in China, likely because they need the higher efficiency to feed their massive population and much of their population lives at latitudes where this design works ideally. In a sprawling US city, each home could have a relatively small greenhouse that would be able to easily feed the family living there and produce some excess for sale or storage, maintained by the family living there. Even in denser situations, a single properly-situated house-sized communal greenhouse could feed a dozen apartments year round (or the suburban ring could produce more food per family for sale to the city center). Setting this up and maintaining it isn't rocket science, and yet I have not seen such a greenhouse in the midwestern US, despite it being the perfect location.
Why do we not do this as individuals? I did a cost-benefit estimate, and a house-sized greenhouse would produce $60,000-120,000 in produce per year with an up-front investment of $30,000 and minimal maintenance costs thereafter (maybe $5,000 a year and likely less). In a suburban setting, there would be minimal transport costs, especially if food was transported to the suburb it was being grown in (perhaps being sold to neighbors). The labor costs are hard to figure out, but growing the produce would likely be no more than full time work for one person. $55,000 is a great wage for gardening/farming, and I do think the higher profit figures are more realistic. This work would also be good exercise.
I don't currently own a house, so I'm now looking fo
Maybe the problem is that we are using the wrong tool for the job. It seems obvious that there are enormous economic and political pressures on the matrix we have now demanding things most would not want. Maybe something that layers a non-commercial mask on top of commodity Internet. This way commercial interests have their place while the mask would protect privacy when not using their matrix.