Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee calls for digital “Magna Carta”

Exactly 25 years to the day after filing the proposal for an information management system that would become the World Wide Web, a whip-smart young computer scientist named Al Gore Tim Berners-Lee has suggested a few tweaks to the medium he helped design.

Speaking with The Guardian earlier today, Sir Tim Berners-Lee described his belief that increasing government and corporate influence have strained the open architecture of the Web, jeopardizing the independence, neutrality, and freedom upon which the system was originally built.

In an attempt to democratically reclaim the Web from corporate and government control, Berners-Lee has helped launch a campaign called “The Web We Want,” asking people around the world to draft an online “Magna Carta.” He describes this as an aspirational Bill of Rights for the future of the Web:

We need a global constitution—a Bill of Rights. Unless we have an open, neutral Internet we can rely on without worrying about what's happening at the back door, we can't have open government, good democracy, good healthcare, connected communities, and diversity of culture. It's not naive to think we can have that, but it is naive to think we can just sit back and get it.

Berners-Lee also took a jab at the entertainment industry and its lobbyists, explaining:

We also need to revisit a lot of legal structure, copyright law—the laws that put people in jail which have been largely set up to protect the movie producers … None of this has been set up to preserve the day to day discourse between individuals and the day to day democracy that we need to run the country.

As part of this campaign, the site WebWeWant.org further urges people around the world to draft a separate “Internet User Bill of Rights” for each country and to push their respective national governments to adopt such documents.

In addition to helping launch the digital Magna Carta initiative, Berners-Lee also hosted an AMA on reddit earlier today, where he discussed both his concerns for, and excitement about, the future of the Web.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/web-inventor-tim-berners-lee-calls-for-digital-magna-carta/

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee calls for digital “Magna Carta”

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee calls for digital “Magna Carta”

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