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) 145
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.
Doesn't matter what we say... (Score:2)
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Anything can be considered hate speech in order to suppress debate, that's what makes the concept so dangerous.
"... governments are responsible ..." (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
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or where the public is manipulated by the big players into demanding that third party access be cut off?
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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 as
Defining Principles of the New Web (Score:2)
1. Porn Wants to Be Free
2.
OK, that's all I got so far.
Open and Decentralized (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Open and Decentralized (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to design something that only keeps the "bad guys" out is doomed to failure as someone will eventually decide that the bad guys are whoever they oppose. Sure that means that you'll get nazis (or some other group that's similarly reviled) but when everyone is free to participate and spread their point of view, you're just as able to expose those vile people to information that they might not otherwise receive.
Re:Open and Decentralized (Score:4)
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I find it humorous that you are discussing this topic in a forum that has been designed specifically to silence ideas that fall outside acceptable groupthink parameters. Censorship is what groups really want, as long as its just limited to their personal flavor of it. Just like every other group. Hence the problem, of which this particular venue cannot speak to as being anything other than a part of that problem.
I see the /. moderation system as the equivalent of an email spam filter. I don't need nor want to see goatse or whatever bullshit, I also don't want to get flooded by the russian troll army. What I'm here for is the gold nuggets, rare as they are. Signal-to-noise is bad enough, without any kind of filtering things would simply be unusable and worthless. Call it censorship if you like, but that's not my definition of this term.
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maybe banning expression is part of the problem..
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No need to amend the Constitution, it's already in there:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
Here is the argument they make.
"Hate speech is violence, not speech, so is not protected anywhere in the US Constitution."
The scariest part is that there are many people, including those in the judiciary, who are willing to ignore reality and go along with such disingenuous, broken logic.
Strat
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Hate Speech" is not really a thing. It's speech that someone does not like or agree with. That happens everyday.
I served in the U.S. Army 30+ years ago and part of the reason that I served was so that EVERYONE would have the clear unadulterated right to say what they think, even if it is reprehensible. That's liberty, folks! That's real freedom!
I say free speech for all, even if it hurts someone's feelings (they'll get over it!). To do anything less is to deny free speech, and that is a slippery slope that
Re:Open and Decentralized (Score:5, Insightful)
All you can do is sweep it under the rug and then 10 years later wonder why there's a nazi army wondering down your street.
Hate speech is combated with more speech, not less.
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Maybe if we had internet back then, we would not have to kill all those millions of people we had.
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There is evidence that censorship does actually work. If it didn't it wouldn't be a problem, or so popular.
Take the alt-right. Some of them have been deplatformed and shunned, e.g. Milo Yiannopoulos who is now massively in debt and not getting anything like the exposure he used to. So apparently deplatforming does actually work.
Even more interesting is how the Nazis massively over-estimated their support and their ability to control the narrative at Charlottesville. That rally set them back hugely, and dest
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How many people did given up being nazis due that, if compared to for example, if you just confronted their ideas and showed why they're wrong?
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Confrontation rarely works to change people's minds. They just get defensive and belligerent.
They are Nazis, rational arguments clearly have little effect on them, and the truth is of little consequence.
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As was pointed below, capturing the ones on the brink is probably the primary goal.
But you probably can crack a "modern nazi", if you attack it's core beliefs rather than just saying the old "the nazi is bad".
Many of those people are in because they were convinced that they're under attack for being white and the solution for it is the final solution.
So you either prove they're not under attack (hard), or you prove that the final solution don't work and they should look for a way that does actually work (ea
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The alt-right's tactic was to try to make Nazism more acceptable to normal people by providing them with gateways like Brietbart. They love to appear in suits, complaining about how they are persecuted and no-one is listening to them as if it's all just a legitimate concern. They use words like "establishment" and "elites" rather than "Jews", to avoid being too obvious.
So the best way to deal with them is not by argument, it's to simply expose what they really are. Then all the people suckered in by their s
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They constantly hunt down anyone that can deliver a "middle of the road" solution, such as Sargon of Akkad, because those kind of people steal their potential targets.
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Sargon is pretty far to the right. He is so far right it fucked up UKIP.
He liked to present himself as moderate and centrist, but his views and policies align with the far right.
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He's not far right enough for the nazis. /pol/ to see.
Just check the constant sargon hate threads on
And their constant attacks on him, such as digging down all his videos to find the one time he used the N word to rat him to patreon and get him cut.
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Their main issue is that he is alt-light, a gateway to the far right Nazism, but is fucking it up really badly. Look at UKIP.
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The trick is not changing the mind of the nazis, it's reaching the people that may be on the brink of being convinced by them. You can't do that if the discourse of nazis is being delivered through hidden channels.
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The nazis themselves tried this approach, and the end result is that the jews now have their own country, and quite a big influence over the global media.
Do you want a nazi country and nazi influence over the media?
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The nazi had a fucking huge army and tanks and were able to take over pretty much all the europe.
Yet they lost in the end, just like you will.
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Right now they're indeed in a tiny number, but people on the left keep just giving em all the tools they need to grow in numbers. They keep creating martyrs, keep feeding their narrative, and keep creating potential new members to the thing.
People like you are literally running the nazi factory, and shooting people trying to stop it because you can't distinguish a moderate from an far right and the far right keeps feeding you the moderates so they can keep rolling their virtual tanks.
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He has problem with the nazis, but the government is actually tied by the constitution.
All he (and the government) can do is to arrest people when they actually commit a crime.
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First of all, Nazi (translated to English) meant "National Socialists Party". How you make the jump from "Nazi" to "Republican", who by definition are NOT socialists, is beyond me!
Second, Nazis were ruthless...they killed people because they belonged to a certain religion (Jews) as well as political prisoners and the infirmed. I have yet to see a Republican kill anyone who belongs to ANY group, especially these groups.
So, by definition, your comparison is not only flawed, it's completely unreasonable. I
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We have all the decentralised stuff already, but people don't want it. They could use BitTorrent for their videos, but they want the be on YouTube because that's where they get paid and that's where the communities are.
Same with distributed web sites on Tor, distributed social media etc.
Distribution is not the answer.
Censorship Is The Web We Want (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
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Remove all the real names from it (Score:2)
Nicknames only.
I hope that's in jest. (Score:2)
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.
I don't like principles (Score:3)
Web and Internet (Score:3)
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.
At the rate we're going we won't have an Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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The media companies also want to control what flows over the internet (usually with help from governments e.g. Article 13 in Europe) in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle and maintain control over the way content gets distributed (both so people have to watch their content instead of the online alternatives and so they can suppress news and factual content that goes against the narrative the media organizations want to spread)
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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 w
How about: (Score:2)
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.
Governments? (Score:2)
Yeah, Tim has gone full nuts.
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Define "we" (Score:2)
Governments, companies and individuals all have unique roles to play.
And each wants something different from/for the Internet.
What bullshit. (Score:3)
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.
Thanks for the DRM. (Score:2)
Sir Tim.
There are only 4 things that need to be done (Score:2)
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
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Absolute sizes, no more pixels or PTs
This is never going to happen as long as images come in pixels. And images will come in pixels for as long as we have photographs.
Getting your freedom of speech back (Score:2)
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 hi
That's nice, Tim, but... (Score:3)
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.
Webnet (Score:2)
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, changi
'free and open Internet' (Score:2)
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'.
Fork them (Score:1)