[BITList] How to save the internet

Tue Nov 6 17:41:05 GMT 2018


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> G'day Folks,
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> 99.999% of the world's population wouldn’t know who Tim Berners-Lee is.
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> ooroo
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> Tuesday, 6 November 2018
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> Good morning. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has launched what he calls a “Magna Carta” for the internet – and tech giants say they’ll sign up.
> What happened to our dream of freedom?
> By Laurence Dodds in San Francisco
> I grew up inside Tim Berners-Lee’s dream. The web which kept me up all night as a teenager was not that different from what he designed in 1989 while working at Cern. It was still a mysterious place focused on the exchange of information – “a civilisation”, in the utopian words of John Perry Barlow, “of the mind”.
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> That dream died (imagine me saying that in an Adam Curtis voice <http://t.email3.telegraph.co.uk/r/?id=h63351228,267ade8f,267ade94>), and now Sir Tim is on a mission to bring it back. He has proposed a new “contract”  <http://t.email3.telegraph.co.uk/r/?id=h63351228,267ade8f,267ade95&WT.mc_id=e_DM869530&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel_2018_11_06&utm_campaign=DM869530>whose signatories will agree to stop abuse, fight against political partnership, uphold net neutrality, and protect users’ privacy. 
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> Early supporters include Gordon Brown, Richard Branson, the government of France, and Facebook and Google. If you’re seeing a potential problem here, have a rare Geocities gif on me.  <http://t.email3.telegraph.co.uk/r/?id=h63351228,267ade8f,267ade96>
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> THE FALLEN WORLD
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> As the web has changed and warped, Sir Tim has become increasingly outspoken about what he appears to see as a perversion of his vision. “I am disappointed with the current state of the Web,” he told Reuters <http://t.email3.telegraph.co.uk/r/?id=h63351228,267ade8f,267ade97>. “We have lost the feeling of individual empowerment and to a certain extent also I think the optimism has cracked.” 
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> On stage at the Web Summit in Lisbon, he was excitable and animated, visibly despairing at the “fake news”, “abuse of personal data” and “manipulation” of the modern web and visibly thrilled by the prospect of what he called a “revolution” in how the internet is monetised and governed.
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> To him, much of this evil stems from the “ad-based funding model” <http://t.email3.telegraph.co.uk/r/?id=h63351228,267ade8f,267ade98&WT.mc_id=e_DM869530&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel_2018_11_06&utm_campaign=DM869530> used by companies such as Google. Change, he thinks, will come from the engineers and programmers who will soon refuse en masse to allow themselves to be part of this mess. 
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> He said all this while standing right next to Jacqueline Fuller, Google’s head of philanthropy, who declared that it was “very supportive of the new contract”.
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> PROMISES, PROMISES
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> I don’t mean to be cynical: tech companies are not just fiddling while Rome burns. Apple is pushing for privacy legislation. Facebook is mobbing up to fight fake news <http://t.email3.telegraph.co.uk/r/?id=h63351228,267ade8f,267ade99&WT.mc_id=e_DM869530&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel_2018_11_06&utm_campaign=DM869530>. Twitter has gone from thinking of itself as a cable company, not responsible for what its users say to each other, to promoting “conversational health”, albeit with mixed results. 
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> But the principles outlined by Sir Tim’s foundation read like a list of pointed rebukes to these firms. It criticises the harvesting of personal data without consent, and then cites allegations that Google routinely collects location data from Android phones  <http://t.email3.telegraph.co.uk/r/?id=h63351228,267ade8f,267ade9a&WT.mc_id=e_DM869530&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel_2018_11_06&utm_campaign=DM869530>even when users have asked it not to do so. It talks about online hate speech, citing Facebook’s role in spreading ethnic cleansing in Burma. 
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> It talks about protecting users from oppressive governments even while Google builds a censored search engine for China. It talks about net neutrality, which all the big tech giants have fought for in the USA but whichFacebook’s “free basics” programme  <http://t.email3.telegraph.co.uk/r/?id=h63351228,267ade8f,267ade9b&WT.mc_id=e_DM869530&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel_2018_11_06&utm_campaign=DM869530>to promote rural internet access has been banned in India for violating. 
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> What are we to make of this? Perhaps that tech giants want to do their best in an imperfect world. Perhaps only that they know these promises are unlikely to be binding. These companies usually try to be on the inside of such efforts: they have signed up to a voluntary EU code on hate speech  <http://t.email3.telegraph.co.uk/r/?id=h63351228,267ade8f,267ade9c&WT.mc_id=e_DM869530&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel_2018_11_06&utm_campaign=DM869530>and now claim to want new privacy laws for the US  <http://t.email3.telegraph.co.uk/r/?id=h63351228,267ade8f,267ade9d&WT.mc_id=e_DM869530&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_Tec_New_TechIntel_2018_11_06&utm_campaign=DM869530>after lobbying against them in California. How well they honour them is another question. 
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> Time will tell, but even if tech giants do their absolute utmost, I doubt we’ll ever resurrect the original dream of the internet. It was killed by vast economic and technological forces no individual can control. Sadly for Sir Tim, I think it’s too late.
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