Like Democracy, the Web Needs to be Defended

The web has worked its way into most of our lives to such an extent that it's easy to take it for granted, and to forget what an incredible resource it is, or the powerful things that it allows us to do as a society. But Sir Tim Berners-Lee says there are threats to the freedom of the web all around us, and that we need to fight them in the same way we fight to protect our freedoms in the real world.

Where are those online threats coming from? Berners-Lee says, "large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web," in what appears to be a clear reference to Facebook's walled-garden approach to sharing things like the email addresses of its users, and he later mentions Facebook specifically as "a silo." The other potential threats, he says, include wireless Internet providers who are "being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals," and also governments — totalitarian and democratic alike — who are "monitoring people's online habits [and] endangering important human rights."