The Web is 25 today, and its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has called for a “Magna Carta” for the Web, through which the people of the world will articulate how they want to curtail their governments’ adversarial attacks on Internet freedom. Berners-Lee is particularly concerned with the Edward Snowden revelations about mass surveillance and systematic government sabotage of Internet security.
I’m delighted to see Berners-Lee tackling this. Everything we do today involves the Web and everything we do tomorrow will require it; getting Web policy right is the first step to getting everything else right.
I hope that this also signals a re-think of Berners-Lee’s endorsement of the idea of standardizing “digital rights management” technology for Web browsers through the W3C. The majority of the Web’s users live in a country in which it is illegal to report on vulnerabilities in DRM, because doing so might help to defeat the DRM’s locks. The standardization of DRM in the deep structures of the Web means that our browsers will become reservoirs of long-lived, critical bugs that can be used to attack Web users — just as Web users are massively expanding the activities that are mediated through their browsers.
If we are to have a Web that is fit for a free and fair world, it must be a Web where researchers are free to warn users about defects in their tools. We wouldn’t countenance a rule that banned engineers from telling you if your house was structurally unsound. By standardizing DRM in browsers, the W3C is setting in place rules that will make it virtually impossible to know if your digital infrastructure is stable and secure.
Principles of privacy, free speech and responsible anonymity would be explored in the Magna Carta scheme. “These issues have crept up on us,” Berners-Lee said. “Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years.”
The web constitution proposal should also examine the impact of copyright laws and the cultural-societal issues around the ethics of technology.
While regional regulation and cultural sensitivities would vary, Berners-Lee said he believed a shared document of principle could provide an international standard for the values of the open web.
An online Magna Carta: Berners-Lee calls for bill of rights for web [Jemima Kiss/Guardian]
(Image: File:Magna Carta (1297 version with seal, owned by David M Rubenstein).png, Wikimedia Commons/public domain)
