Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the World Wide Web, wants to fix it with a new “Contract for the Web” which he is asking big tech companies and governments sign.
The World Wide Web is turning thirty in May, and its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, doesn’t like where things are heading. Whether it’s Edward Snowden’s revelations about online surveillance, the exclusion of rural populations and women from access to the web, or scandals like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica affair, the Internet is broken.
While Berners-Lee has spent the last few years campaigning to fix things, but now his plea is even more desperate. His Web Foundation has now launched a new “Contract for the Web,” and is getting tech companies like Facebook and Google to sign up.
As Berners-Lee himself explains, “Those of us who are online are seeing our rights and freedoms threatened. We need a new Contract for the Web, with clear and tough responsibilities for those who have the power to make it better.”
While the contract isn’t fully ready at the moment, it will be published in May 2019 for the Web’s 30th birthday. It is also a milestone moment when half of the world’s population is expected to be online. The contract contains a set of principles around the idea of affordable access and consumer privacy which are both issues facing the Internet and its users today.
Berners-Lee recently criticised the big tech companies and called for them to be broken up as there is “over-concentration in the tech sphere,” but admits that the same result can be obtained with other means. Currently, the French government, billionaire Richard Branson, Facebook, and Google are all allegedly on board with the contract, but Amazon hasn’t signed up (yet, presumably).
At Web Summit in Lisbon recently, Berners Lee explained that “Each party is going to have to commit to solidifying and living by some values, tweaking the way they work and increasing their trustability and the extent to which they trust other people. We’re not expecting anyone to do it out of altruism. We’re expecting them to do it out of collaboration.”
You might also like
More from Tech
YouTube Is Testing AI-Generated Video Summaries
YouTube has recently started testing a new feature that automatically generates summaries of videos using AI.
Meta Launches ‘Meta Quest+’ VR Subscription For $7.99
The new Meta Quest subscription will give you access to the top titles on the device every month. It costs …
YouTube Is Adding AI-Powered Dubbing
YouTube is integrating the team from Aloud to help you dub your videos in other languages with the help of …
New VEED AI Tool Helps You Fix Your Gaze In Videos
How many times have you struggled to keep eye contact with a camera when filming a video and reading off …
Apple Will Automatically Assign You An Apple ID Passkey With iOS 17 And macOS Sonoma
Apple will automatically assign each user a passkey so they can log into Apple accounts without needing a password. Passkey allocation …
IKEA Used AI To Create A Couch That Can Fold Like An Envelope
A design lab affiliated with IKEA used AI to design a couch that only weighs 22 pounds and can fold …
5 Long-Awaited Features Apple Is Finally Bringing To The iPhone With iOS 17
At WWDC 2023, Apple introduced several new features that will come with the release of iOS 17. Here are the …
Leaked: Instagram Is Working On An AI Chatbot
Images leaked by app researcher Alessandra Paluzzi show that Instagram is working on an AI chatbot. According to the images shared …
ChatGPT Maker OpenAI Is Now The Fastest Growing Website
Traffic to the OpenAI website grew by 54.21% in March – the greatest leap among the world’s leading websites. OpenAI now …
