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Berners-Lee's proposal for the web. Image: CERN
Anne Jellema: The Web Foundation was established by Tim Berners-Lee four years ago to advance his vision of an open and free web that empowers all of humanity. So we work to establish the open and free web as a global public good and a basic right, and to make sure that everyone can benefit from it.When you say an “open and free web,” what exactly do you mean?
We mean a web that allows everybody to freely communicate, connect, collaborate, exercise their right to freedom of expression and information and freedom of association, and empowers them to find solutions to the problems facing them—and that does so in a way that is true to the original spirit of Tim’s invention, i.e. decentralised, permissionless, non-proprietary, and neutral.In your view, what are the biggest threats to the web right now?
Well, on the plus side we have never been so close in all of human history to achieving a world where everybody is able to communicate and access information and create things and express themselves, regardless of income or geographical location or social barriers. So we’re very, very close to something truly transformative to the world, but there are some challenges that could prevent us from reaching that goal.
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Anne Jellema. Image: Web Foundation
The third is the growing centralisation of the internet. An increasing proportion of our communications now flow through just a tiny handful of companies. That’s happened because these companies provide genuine value added to consumers; they have great services and they’re incredibly easy to use and they’re colourful. But the unintended consequence of that has been a very strong concentration of both our online data flowing through the servers of these companies and also the ways in which our online experience, what we learn and do online, is filtered through the passages that we access.Three in five of the world’s people are not online at all, and that is largely a matter of affordability.
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Well, there are a lot of solutions that add up to universal access. Investment in public access programs is one of them; creating the conditions for genuine competition in the marketplace at every layer of services and infrastructure, that’s very important.
This map shows broadband subscribers per 100 population as of 2012; the darker the colour, the better connected the country is. Image: Web Foundation
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Well, we do an annual report, the Web Index, which tracks the health of the web and its contribution to human rights and development in 81 countries around the world, and last year we found that fewer than five percent of the 81 countries that we looked at had best practice measures in place for due process and oversight of communications surveillance.So really only a tiny handful of countries have laws and institutions in place that are adequate to deal with the issues raised by the technological possibilities of data collection online, and that’s something that needs to change very quickly.
This maps rates the web's freedom and openness around the world; Norway takes the top spot. Image: Web Foundation
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Yes, it’s a challenge. Ultimately, the decisions about who can collect data and what they can do with it are always going to be made at a national level, so it’s very important that each country has a robust legal framework to protect our rights online.But at the same time, it’s important that legal frameworks protect our right to freedom on the global web and not just a national web. We need to embed the principle of universality and access to global sources of information and association, not just within national borders.
They call it extraterritoriality, a fancy legal word I learned recently, which means that countries have to respect the privacy of people living in other countries, not just within their own borders. It’s actually a very critical principle for our new networked digital world.As we’ve seen with the revelations about the NSA, even if there are proper protections for American citizens against snooping without a warrant, that won’t necessarily apply to citizens in other countries who use Google or Microsoft or Facebook or other services based in the US. So the solution to that is that the principle of extraterritoriality is respected, so that citizens of any country can have confidence that their privacy is not being violated by another country.We need laws that have been updated to reflect the reality of the digital era and that provide real democratic accountability.
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That’s a good question, and I think the ones we’ve been working with around issues of affordability and issues of freedom and privacy online, they’ve actually been asking national governments to form their laws. They don’t want to be the ones who are left having to take decisions about people’s privacy and what’s permissible for national security. So number one, at a governmental level we need laws that have been updated to reflect the reality of the digital era and that provide real democratic accountability and oversight for surveillance.Secondly, companies have a responsibility to implement the best possible encryption on their systems. Some of them have done a great job, others have not.Third, of course, is transparency, so disclosing as much as they can—as much as they’re legally permitted to—to people who are the targets of data collection requests. So that comes back to the point of reforming laws and oversight nationally, because we can’t expect companies to do things that are actually illegal!But they need to be involved in helping to advocate and push for that reform and they also need to provide maximum transparency within the limits of what they can do right now. Again, some people have been more proactive than others on the transparency front.Indeed. What do you hope the web will look like in the next 25 years?
Well, as I said, we’re hoping that the web will continue to grow so that it reaches its true potential of connecting everyone on the planet, providing them with the means to make their voice heard, create and shape the world that they live in, without regard to their income or class or geographic location.And that an open and free web can underpin a truly participatory democracy and economy that can help us address the many other challenges that we face in the next 25 years.