Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web said he wants to fix the web. The web inventor revealed a new campaign on Monday called “Contract for the Web” at the web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The aim of the campaign is to promote the principles for governments, companies, and citizens to improve the internet and fight back against hate speech, privacy concerns, and political manipulation.
According to his statement during the announcement of the project which was organized by his nonprofit the World Wide Web Foundation, “Those of us who are online are seeing our rights and freedoms threatened”. He states the contract outlines “clear and tough responsibilities” for those with the power to make the internet a better place.
The contract will be published fully in May 2019, and more than 50 top tech and start-up companies around the world have signed the contract. They include Facebook, Google and the French government at the list.
The contract which includes nine principles asks the government to ensure all citizens can connect to the internet, the companies should respect the customer’s privacy and personal data and also, the citizens should create “rich and relevant content for everyone.”
Berners-Lee also said, “A lot of companies are finding it so exciting to be able to switch from trying to exploit you, trying to make you buy something you didn’t want to buy, to actually switch back to the core business model of helping the user and generating value for the user.” He stated that personal data is not as important to companies as one people might expect. Pushing back on the idea that tech companies need to collect data to be profitable, He said: “Maybe it is a myth”.
People won’t just give out their data once they know they have dominion over it, He stated. People can still choose to share information with their employers or companies they do business with. “The idea of control over your own data is not about me being my own silo, locking everything away,” he said. “It’s actually having the joy of being able to share it with whoever.”
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