On the 25th anniversary of his proposal for the realm Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee wants Internet users to come back to the Web’s defense.
On the Web’s 25th anniversary, the inventor of the sector Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has called for the establishment of “a digital bill of rights to advance a free and open Web for everybody.” He’s established an internet site, webat25.org, to advance that cause.
Berners-Lee’s post was published at the official blog of Google, a corporation that has long championed the internet as a free, open platform for innovation, and has fought meaningful battles against censorship, while it has weathered criticism for being below open with its Android mobile operating system and about customers’ advertising campaign data.
It was Google in 2009 that proclaimed, “the internet has won,” an announcement arguably still valid from a platform standpoint. As Berners-Lee puts it, the net works with any information, on any device, with any software, in any language. Anyone can innovate on the net without permission. An analogous can’t be said for other platforms, although open-source software offers similar freedom.
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Yet there’s no real victory in a dynamic world. Settled battles are destined to be fought again. Every open field looks inviting to builders of toll roads. The upward push of mobile devices has shifted power to the businesses that control software and hardware platforms — to Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, among others. The internet is a second-class citizen on mobile devices.
The Web’s vaunted openness soon will face limits inside the style of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a framework for presenting media protected by DRM within the browser, without proprietary plugin technologies akin to Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. It’s a compromise that will be essential to keep high-value content from fleeing the internet. But it surely will transform the internet from “free and open” to “free and open, some limitations apply.”
Whatever freedom and openness remains on the internet is being eroded as nations become more proficient at censorship. Even an ostensibly open country like the US has struggled to reconcile promised rights akin to the 1st and Fourth Amendments with how it handles leaks and perceived threats. As an example, US Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., recently wrote to the organizers of the South by Southwest Interactive conference asking them to disclaim NSA whistleblower and fugitive Edward Snowden — still a US citizen despite the revocation of his passport — the chance to talk to conference attendees via the internet.
In The New York Times on Wednesday, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, presented an op-ed column calling on policymakers, companies, and individuals to enroll in with Internet activists to fight the rising tide of online censorship around the globe.
Berners-Lee is absolutely not alone in seeing a threat to the internet and the Web’s democratic ideals. But even though Internet users come together to support freedom and openness, enabling something technically doesn’t suggest there’s sufficient political will to simply accept the open Web and all that it entails. If technology companies were willing to refuse to arm anti-democratic regimes with systems for surveillance and oppression, the net might flourish with fewer restraints around the world. But few companies have followed the ethical high road far from China, Russia, and similar regimes.
Among the questions Berners-Lee poses is, “How will we build systems of checks and balances to carry the groups which can spy on the web accountable to the general public?” The reply, sadly, will not be with an insignificant digital bill of rights.
When the pinnacle of the Senate Intelligence Committee is accusing the CIA of undermining government oversight of the agency by secretly on the search for and removing documents from computers utilized by committee members, it seems that even a rustic with a real Bill of Rights can see checks, balances, and accountability fall in need of what its laws suggest it may expect.
The Web doesn’t desire a digital bill of rights up to it needs a military to enforce rights that exist already but aren’t taken seriously by the powers that be. Either that or it needs technology that trumps government exceptionalism and authoritarian force. That might be real innovation.
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Thomas Claburn was writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications consisting of New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv, having earned a not particularly useful … View Full Bio
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