The World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has published his grand plan to fix the Internet to save users from political manipulation, fake news, privacy mishaps, and other horrors of it.
The “Contract of the Web” lays a number of principals for governments, tech giants, and users to be followed, including laws for affordable internet, safeguarding privacy, controlling online abuse, and more.
As of now, more than 150 organizations have backed the massive project, including some big names such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, DuckDuckGo, Twitter, Amazon, etc. The governments of Ghana, Germany, and France have also signed up for the new Internet laws.
What is Contract for the Web?
Back in November last year, Tim Berners-Lee gave a sneak peek of “Contract for the Web” at the Web Summit Technology Conference. The World Wide Web Foundation, backed by Tim Berners-Lee, released the first part of the contract listing out nine core principles for governments, internet companies, and individuals.
Each principle has a significant role in shaping the new Internet. According to the contract, government duties involve making sure that everyone who wants to is connected to the Internet. Moreover, all the netizens should have a stronghold on their privacy; they are allowed to withdraw their data whenever they wish to.
The role of Internet companies is to simply the privacy settings and set up control panels that will allow consumers to see what data about them is collected. The idea is to save the internet from the “digital dystopia” that lies ahead in the future.
For long, Tim has argued that online abuse, discrimination, political manipulation, the threat to privacy have taken over the Internet. There needs to be a set of global laws to save people from the horrors of the world’s most powerful tool.
The next step
With the help of major organizations and interested individuals, Tim and his foundation have managed to draft over 76 clauses alongside the nine principals.
Now, the next step is to make tech companies and organizations follow the new rules. Organizations, backing up the project, will have to implement the rules and build up a report on that.
“If we don’t act now — and act together — to prevent the web being misused by those who want to exploit, divide and undermine, we are at risk of squandering that potential,” Berners-Lee said.
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