Guardian, The

The inventor of the World Wide Web believes an online "Magna Carta" is needed to protect and enshrine the independence of the medium he created and the rights of its users worldwide.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the Guardian the web had come under increasing attack from governments and corporate influence and that new rules were needed to protect the "open, neutral" system. Speaking exactly 25 years after he wrote the first draft of the first proposal for what would become the World Wide Web, the computer scientist said: "We need a global constitution -- a bill of rights." Berners-Lee's Magna Carta plan is to be taken up as part of an initiative called "the web we want", which calls on people to generate a digital bill of rights in each country -- a statement of principles he hopes will be supported by public institutions, government officials and corporations. "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."

Principles of privacy, free speech and responsible anonymity would be explored in the Magna Carta scheme. Berners-Lee also spoke out strongly in favor of changing a key and controversial element of Internet governance that would remove a small but symbolic piece of US control. The US has clung on to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) contract, which controls the dominant database of all domain names, but has faced increased pressure post-Snowden.

He said: "The removal of the explicit link to the US department of commerce is long overdue. The US can't have a global place in the running of something which is so non-national. There is huge momentum towards that uncoupling but it is right that we keep a multi-stakeholder approach, and one where governments and companies are both kept at arm's length."

[Commentary] “You are the firefighters,” National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden told a tech savvy audience, during my conversation with him at the South by Southwest festival. “The people in Austin are the ones who can protect our rights through technical standards.”

Ed’s comments were a call to arms for the tech community to protect its users from indiscriminate mass surveillance by the NSA and the insecurity it creates. Over the past few years, and even more so after Ed’s revelations, Silicon Valley companies have begun to enable -- by default -- basic security features, such as the use of HTTPS encryption to protect data as it is transmitted from their customers’ to the companies’ servers. While HTTPS encryption by default is a great start, isn’t enough. The tech companies must offer apps and services that are safe and secure by default.

• Disable data, all the way. Far too often, security is an opt-in feature that few regular people will even know about, much less seek out and enable.
• Limit collection, move up storage deadlines. As Ed stressed, tech companies can also begin to limit the data they collect from their customers and only store it for as long as it’s needed for genuine business purposes -- and not one second longer.
• Rethink our relationship with tech companies. We, the everyday consumers, must make privacy and security profitable. If we want these companies to put our interests first, we must pay for the services that they provide us. We must demand that those products preserve privacy -- again, by default. Until this business model changes, the services that are made for the mass market will remain insecure, vulnerable and optimized for data collection.

[Soghoian is principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union]

[March 11]