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Tim Berners-Lee unveils plan to save the web

149 points by edward 7y ago

vojnovski 7y ago
Link to the Plan (or Contract as it's being called): https://contractfortheweb.org/ https://contractfortheweb.org/
- generalpass 7y ago
  When I saw that all I could think, "Newt Gingrich, is that you?"
- leppr 7y ago
  The site's GDPR pop-up doesn't allow opt-out of tracking. What a great example to set for the web.
  - chopin 7y ago
    And phones home to a bunch of Google sites. I think we can safely ignore this.
PaulHoule 7y ago
It is good that he is talking about people, their motivations, their rights, their responsibilities, than about technology. (e.g. "Technology X is going to save us")
woodandsteel 7y ago
I like the principles, but I am pessimistic he can persuade the tech companies and many of the governments (China, Russia, Iran, for instance) to adopt them. That's because they have such strong motivations to keep things as they are, and even make them worse.
- lggdn 7y ago
  Why single out China, Russia, Iran? > That's because they have such strong motivations to keep things as they are, and even make them worse. And the EU, Britain, US, etc don't? I know it's hard to believe, the leader of internet censorship isn't in China, Russia or Iran. It's in europe. "Germany’s Online Crackdowns Inspire the World’s Dictators" https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdowns-inspired-the-worlds-dictators-russia-venezuela-india/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdow... And the leaders of tech censorship isn't in China, it's in the US since major tech companies are in the US.
  - sadness2 7y ago
    > And the leaders of tech censorship isn't in China, it's in the US since major tech companies are in the US. This is like saying Iran is the biggest polluter because they produce oil.
Aeolun 7y ago
Does anyone mind me being skeptical if this plan has been signed by Google, MS and Facebook from the start? These all sound very nice, but I don’t think there’s any company or government that would claim not to do these things.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  Agreed. Does Google and Facebook "signing" it mean they agree to abide buy the plan? If not, signing it means nothing. If so, then either they are lying, or the plan imposes so few restrictions that it is worthless.
  - fourthark 7y ago
    The article says they will be kicked out if they don’t abide by the contract. We’ll see if that actually happens.
    - larnmar 7y ago
      Almost all the points are deliberately left so vague that almost anyone can claim that they’re abiding with them. A goodly number of points are also left so vague that almost anyone can claim that their opponent isn’t abiding by them, providing a perfect environment for anarcho-tyranny.
    - harry8 7y ago
      "We were excited to support their stated goals but have now resigned as we disgaree strongly with the way they have changed their focus and departed from sense to something wholly unworkable which makes us all sad." --googbrick 2 sweeps: 1) How many of those words will actually be meaningfully different when their statements are released? 2) When will they pull the trigger to make that happen?
      - harry8 7y ago
        Option (b) is of course regulatory capture whereby googbrick innoculate themesleves from any meanigful future competition. They'll definitely try that and will embrace totally if they can make it work in some financially meanigful way in their favour. Does Berners-Lee have any form in policy? Did he have genuine inventive insight or just right place right time permissive license? These are genuine questions I'm asking to which I don't have answers - maybe he's saved the web before, and his inventive insight was utterly brilliant for all I know?
wesammikhail 7y ago
In my opinion, any form of action that is based on a political or social arrangement is doomed to fail as it is subject to hijacking at best. Any potential solution(s) has to be routed in actual technological changes that are backed by well designed protocols that cannot be changed over night or misused in the benefit of whomever wields the stick at any given point.All else is waste of time. That´s just my 2 cents though!
- a3n 7y ago
  Yeah, but you do have to try. The political and social arrangement of the U.S. Constitution, for example, is worth trying to preserve. It will only endure if most of us, and our leaders, agree to follow it. Most such arrangements are shared illusions that are doomed, unless we agree to follow them. It really boils down to that, because we are all fundamentally free to act as selfish savages of we want.
- ebcode 7y ago
  But the internet is a political and social arrangement. It's easy to forget in cyberspace the very physical situation of electrons and photons moving through wires and air. All this exists in pipes on the surface of the earth, in satellites overhead, and in undersea cables. These are all owned by somebody, or some thing. If you want to really get at the root causes of the issues TBL is raising, you're going to have to address the idea of private property. TBL isn't doing that (as far as I can tell), and so of course everyone (and thing) is on board.
mirimir 7y ago
> Three more principles call on individuals to create rich and relevant content to make the web a valuable place, build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome, and finally, to fight for the web, so it remains open to everyone, everywhere. The "build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome" point seems impossibly idealistic. And indeed, for lack of a better word, boring. I'd rather have a diversity of communities, run however they choose. If someone doesn't feel "safe and welcome", they can just go away. Also, from https://contractfortheweb.org/ https://contractfortheweb.org/: > 1. By working towards a more inclusive Web: > a. Adopting best practices on civil discourse online and educating the next generation on these matters. Why must all discourse be "civil"? I mean, that's a value here at HN. But it's not one for the chans. So shouldn't people have the right to choose? > b. Committing to amplify the messages of systematically excluded groups, and standing up for them when they are being targeted or abused. I can't help laughing at this. Because I'm like 99% sure that they aren't including neo-Nazis here. Or even the incels who aren't even vaguely neo-Nazi. Anyway, in my ideal internet, everyone could post whatever they want, as anonymously as they want, and as resistant to takedown as they want. And everyone else could choose what to access.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome A “strong” community necessarily has members and non-members, insiders and outsiders. If it doesn’t it’s not a community in any meaningful sense, it’s just an amorphous crowd. The idea of a community that welcomes everyone literally is a contradiction in terms.
  - krapp 7y ago
    If you think of the internet, as a whole, as a single "community" then you're right - and I think it would be infeasible to apply a particular moral or ethical (and inevitably cultural and political) standard at that level, since "the internet" literally encompasses all of humanity. But if the internet is seen for what it is, a network of networks and the web a community of communities then there's no paradox - if one is not comfortable or welcomed in one community, one can move to, or start, another community that more accepting. But then, that allows for exactly the sort of toxic and abusive communities and users that TBL and many others believe are "destroying" the web. And they're kind of correct, but not because these communities exist, per se, or because the 'wrong sorts of people' are allowed to use the web, but because visibility and dialogue has been mostly centralized along a few large platforms with disproportionate influence, and as a result of the effect of SEO and social media algorithms, much of the diversity of the web has been filtered out for the sake of extremist and commercial content.
kyledrake 7y ago
If he really wants to save the web, maybe start by reversing the insane decision on EME DRM that allowed it to turn into a secret vote at the W3C https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-controversy-w3c-greenlights-drm-web https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-con... I'm really sick of these "influencers" doing horrible things and then coming back and expecting us to give them blank checks as defenders of the web, when they only seem to do the right thing when it's convenient for them. Get your own house in order before coming out and trying to fix everybody else's.
- bArray 7y ago
  Agreed, I think Tim has gone off the deep end. The time to be vocal about the future direction of the web was in the wake of the dot com bubble. I think this is just a case of him trying to secure his legacy.
  - rangibaby 7y ago
    "I think this is just a case of him trying to secure his legacy." I think that's a bit harsh. His invention is one of the greatest of all time, that's quite a legacy
    - w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago
      Agree. The greatest invention since the printing machine by Gutenberg.
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      His invention is one of the greatest of all time I am not saying I would have done any better than him in the circumstances but let’s be honest: TBL didn’t invent hypertext and the WWW is just a poor knock-off of Englebart’s ideas. It has taken millions of people decades to turn the WWW into something that can be secured and scaled and actually be useful to ordinary people. TBL was in the right place at the right time but don’t overestimate his actual contribution. http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/158/90/ http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/158/90/
kd3 7y ago
Principles on paper won't work. We need to build these principles into the technology at a fundamental level so that anyone using it can't do anything else but use it based on those principles. The technology should require it and not be able to work otherwise unless you break it.
- a3n 7y ago
  No tech is fool proof, although we should always try for the practical best. But, say our current tech is as good as we know how to make it. Data breaches, for example, would be much less s problem if we held relevant people accountable for due care. Who was the last CxO who went to jail, or was even criminally investigated and found innocent, for a data breach into their org? Or a perpetrator, for that matter?
  - kd3 7y ago
    In the long term "laws" won't work. What we see throughout history is that they never work and those who are elected to see to it that it works themselves are corrupt. The best option is to code it in the technology. For example, we can make laws and regulation to see to it that governments don't take more debt or print more money than they should in order not to cause inflation and economic crisis, but what we've seen throughout history is that this never works in the long term. The better solution was the one Satoshi came up with: program the fixed amount of currency into the Bitcoin technology with computational and mathematical checks. Now it's extremely difficult to do anything else unless you can somehow control or convince the majority of the nodes to accept it. The same kind of solutions should be developed for the web.
gremlinsinc 7y ago
What if there were a way to create some sort of centralized/decentralized identity store... where anyone wanting access to your information would have to request it, you then supply them a 'key' to gain access...like a pgp key... they can then use your data for business purposes that you allow... you can destroy keys at will so you ALWAYS have the means to shut off a business who's abusing your information, or you could drop off the entire grid by basically revoking all keys... This would apply to images as well with your likeness (ai-made or w/e)...though I'm not sure how you'd enforce that, unless the protocol also did facial reck/search online notifying you of images of you, that you can then force to be taken offline through legal means. Of course there's the argument of who owns the copyright -- the person in the picture or the photographer even if they took photo w/ or without your permission/knowledge...etc... I'm not sure how this would work in the wild, and it's just a concept idea... It would be nice though in the case of a true dystopian future to be able to pull yourself off the grid easier than it is today.
- ss3000 7y ago
  I have also pondered on variations of this idea of users _owning_ their own data and only granting access to their data to apps they trust, as a means to counter the status quo of every company holding users' data hostage in their own walled gardens and preventing data mobility between apps. However, the one thing that I've always struggled with is how to handle apps that need write access to users' data in order to be useful. For instance, a messaging app needs to be able to write new messages onto the user-owned data store, but if we allow arbitrary reads/writes to some namespaced path to the store, an app simply needs to encrypt the data with some secret key that the user doesn't know in order to build a decentralized walled garden that stifles data mobility in the same way that centralized walled gardens do today.
  - baroffoos 7y ago
    Sometimes problems are better solved legally rather than technically. You could spend all year thinking of a way to prevent this or you could just have a law that states that users must have access to machine readable copies of all the data you collect about them. To a computer there is very little you can do to distinguish between obfuscated and regular data but to a human/legal system the difference is clear.
buboard 7y ago
Want to save the web quick? Enable 402 Payment Required through some form of digital wallet that will allow anonymized payments. The lack of payment streams is the biggest driver of garbage
- tzs 7y ago
  A big problem with sites being paid directly by users is how to treat that transaction legally. It may require the site to register as a business in every jurisdiction it has paying visitors, collect taxes for each jurisdiction, and comply with each jurisdiction’s consumer protection, privacy, and content restriction laws. I don’t think you will see any large scale movement to micropayments until at least the EU and the various US states change their legal frameworks for digital goods to characterize these transactions as being solely under the jurisdiction of where the site resides.
  - Mengkudulangsat 7y ago
    Just like how the real world has shadow-banking to serve the marginalized, so should the internet. I'm keen on the idea that a vibrant portion of internet commerce should be opaque to governments. Perhaps not the best place to start a formal business in; where you have to think about accounting and taxes, but it will be a boon for ad-hoc informal businesses. I'd like to think of it as facilitating the primordial soup that will give rise to new ways of doing things.
    - ddalex 7y ago
      I've seen postit notes in London advertising (illegal) weed sale by chatting on encrypted messenger and paying with crypto coin. Both attempts to keep the authorities in shadow. Add this to the black markets for exploits, data dump leaks, and skimmed CC info - I'd say that certainly there is a healthy shadow market on the webz out there. The only thing - it's not as visible as it was, say, 10 years ago, when Silk Road was well known, and we all know how that ended.
  - buboard 7y ago
    not just a problem, it is THE problem. It can be done, perhaps by having a browser wallet with a limit $/person/month, and the transactions can be verifiable, but anonymous. Tax systems from 2 centuries ago do not serve us well anymore
geowwy 7y ago
> Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone > 1. By crafting policies that address the needs of systematically excluded > groups > a. Designing gender responsive and inclusive data plans targeting women and > other systematically excluded groups. What's he suggesting? Give women discounted internet?
- function_seven 7y ago
  For mobile users: > Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone > 1. By crafting policies that address the needs of systematically excluded groups > a. Designing gender responsive and inclusive data plans targeting women and other systematically excluded groups
  - tedunangst 7y ago
    So which gender gets the most data?
- bArray 7y ago
  > What's he suggesting? The fact that it is ambiguous leaves room for it to mean whatever the controlling party wants it to mean. As long as people can't agree on something as fundamental as the goal, it's doomed to fail. > Give women discounted internet? Somehow I don't think he was suggesting a "pink tax" or some kind of "ladies internet" that filters some explicit pictures. I think "inclusive" roughly translates as favorable in sentences like these. Surely the fact that the internet is the exact same price for everybody, regardless of group characteristics, is the ultimate goal? I don't think it is sensible to begin adding bias where there currently is none.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    > Somehow I don't think he was suggesting a "pink tax" or some kind of "ladies internet" that filters some explicit pictures. It's my impression that the price of internet access is at least somewhat proportional to local cost of living. And I don't see why there shouldn't be income-based discounts. But, perhaps bizarrely enough, I do think that filtered internet access is a very sensible idea. I mean, it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access by their underage children. HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users can manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe search" settings. So why not let users set that up at the ISP level?
symplee 7y ago
At some point doesn't it becomes easier to start anew Vs. trying to derail the ten trillion-dollar freight-train momentum of the current Internet?
crazygringo 7y ago
I'm sorry, but this just sounds like a bunch of feel-good babble that isn't taking anything seriously. Free speech? Fundamental rights? "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"? Yes, these are all good things. But also all in deep, fundamental conflict with each other. Moral and political philosophers have been debating how to resolve them for centuries... and the disagreements are just as strong as ever. His plan isn't taking any strong stances at all, which would involve actually making decisions between competing values. Instead, he's just trying to have it all -- which sounds good, but provides zero actionable guidance.
- lggdn 7y ago
  It's even worse than feel-good babble. It's signaling TBL's shift from advocating a decentralized free internet towards a centralized censored internet. "Free speech? Fundamental rights?" are what we want, but people who claim to want free speech and then claim they want "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"? ultimately mean that they want censorship. It's basically what happened to social media and the internet. Remember that everyone from Reddit to Zuckerburg to news companies claimed they supported free speech a decade ago. Then money/politics/etc got involved and they started talking about ""Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"?" and we have a censored dystopia on our hands. In china, they use "harmony" as a propaganda tool to justify censorship. In the west, we use "civility" along with "best in humanity", "universal human rights", etc to justify censorship.
  - 72deluxe 7y ago
    I suppose it comes down to who defines "the best" or what good and bad is. Your definition most likely won't be the same as mine. Times that by 6 billion (and different cultural attitudes in different lands) and it's obvious we will never always agree. The World Wide Web won't solve the differences between people. I think we should stop pretending it will, or expecting too much of a collection of computer-served XML. That's all it is, fundamentally. I would probably say that politics and social movements should stay out of this serving of XML, as you can't keep all of the people happy all of the time, so why try? Increasingly the machines we use are sending data back instead of serving us, frustratingly.
GoForthAssemble 7y ago
Most of these answers make me think FAANG staff are a bit omnipresent on HN nowadays. You know he, standing on Vert's shoulders, invented the flipping WWW right? You know better and are trying to do what about it exactly?? Oh yeah, make money.
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
I see it's backed by Microsoft, Google and Facebook, which means it's either impotent or horrible.
agotterer 7y ago
We can start by preventing ads that highjack pages and redirect to undesirable locations. I tried three times to read the article on my phone and was redirected to other sites.
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  Yes, and that is part of what is stupid in the web browser design; the design of the software, and of the W3C standards, need to be improved.
zzo38computer 7y ago
We will need to support not breaking the internet; the web is just a part of that. Still, they should fix it by making W3C specifications so that it doesn't have the stupid stuff (because there is a lot of stupid stuff in it now); but, also is needed to protect free and open internet too, which is separate but related (and will help to save the web too, although it won't do it by itself because there are other issues than internet involved). Such as, ensure that internet packets can be freely distributed (to their intended destination) without tampering, if they follow the transport-layer protocols (application-layer protocols, such as HTTP(S), is not the job of the ISP to enforce; you can use any application-layer protocols on any port numbers in either direction (it is the job only of the two end points (client and server) to block the packets they don't want, and not anyone else)). The issues specific to web is to improve the web browser software (a lot of the stuff is stupid designs, I think). For internet, ensure you can be part of internet.
danschumann 7y ago
IMO, news serves the same purpose as zip files... A concise yet accurate representation of the whole. What we have today is curve fitting of events to a narrative, taking only the sentences which create a permutation to support the bias, not seeking summation. And/or the curve fits an emotional goal(ie to scare readers into action). But we can measure zip's efficiency, but it's harder to measure the true accuracy of events when summarizing, because different points are of varying levels of importance to different people. This has led me to pay attention to the signal and ignore the noise; watching the full speeches, and viewing the sources myself, but most people aren't so inclined, they just shriek & rage, baited by an inaccurate context shrinker. Thus, we have hyper informed people who watch full context, as well as severely misinformed folks, getting bad recaps. It is like the income disparity gap with information.
- HerpDerpLerp 7y ago
  IAmVerySmart
cmdshiftf4 7y ago
6 months ago Berners-Lee was claiming to be on the road to rolling out Web 2.0, a de-centralized protocol we'd all jump on to be free of this cruft. Fast-forward to now and his new scheme is a sort of UN for Web 1.0? And, like the UN, one that is totally powerless beyond sternly written letters and is governed by some of the greatest infringers of the very rights it's claiming to protect? I'm going to assume he isn't as naive as one would have to be to blindly push such a doomed-to-fail proposition, so on the same assumption this has to be some sort of fight for relevancy or mere publicity.
infectoid 7y ago
What happened to TBL's other project where everything was supposed to be decentralised? https://solid.mit.edu https://solid.mit.edu Is it dead?
- rapnie 7y ago
  It is not dead, but also not progressing very fast. I think low adoption rate is their biggest hurdle, and subsequent lack of network effects in the development community. Solid based on a bunch of Linked Data standards which find most traction in small academic circles. Few sexy applications or good libraries to build from. The Gitter channels are apparently most active. Web: https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ Forum: https://forum.solidproject.org/ https://forum.solidproject.org/ Gitter channels, etc: https://github.com/solid/information/blob/master/gitter-chat-overview.md https://github.com/solid/information/blob/master/gitter-chat... Repo: https://github.com/solid/solid https://github.com/solid/solid
- Vinnl 7y ago
  It's not dead! It's just no longer at MIT (as is also mentioned on the website you linked). Tim founded a startup called inrupt (disclosure: I work there, opinions my own) that aims to stimulate commercial adoption. The links in the sibling comment by rapnie are an excellent place to start.
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    How does an organisation even stimulate others to adopt Solid? I cannot imagine your daily activities. Can you elaborate, assuming you would be comfortable to do so?
    - Vinnl 7y ago
      I can't disclose everything (I'm not involved with all the parts of the company), but the most important way in which I contribute to that is by building developer tooling and writing documentation for engineers looking to write apps on Solid.
SllX 7y ago
If you care one wit about saving the web, then you will recognize that both the best and the worst of humanity will continue to coexist on the web so long as they continue to exist within humanity. That does not mean that from a policy or prosecutorial perspective we should not continue to investigate and prosecute crimes as they occur, but crime will occur, and the best we can do is work to protect ourselves and others. That means security and privacy and cryptography. Now there is the question, does the web need to be saved? I’m open to discussing whether it does, but the problem with this assertion is that it has never been easier to build and host a website containing all that you can legally host. If there are problems, they are legal, not technical. You can host webshit or family photos or pornography or your blog or a list of links to your favorite websites or a collection of selfies or a review site or a private reddit clone or your class notes or some personal research or any number of other things, because I could sit here all night typing out examples and probably find out of Hacker News has a character limit in the process. You can serve JavaScript or ads or well designed style sheets or really really bad style sheets they make the blink tag look positively understated, or you can serve plain Jane HTML or even plainer text files, or even PDFs or DOCs or DOCX files or videos or sounds or any number of other binaries. I’m not sure entirely what we’ve lost besides the websites that the owners have chosen not to host any longer. People have made bad choices about where to host the only copies of something they loved and built and hosted on someone else’s server, only to see those sites shut down, and will probably continue to make such choices. This is fine, an integral part of liberty is to have the ability to source enough rope to hang yourself with. Enjoy the things you have now, for nothing lasts forever. Make that which you would like to see more of to seed the world and inspire others.
newscracker 7y ago
Google, Facebook and Microsoft are supporters of this? And do their names have to come before many others in the list? Do these companies now have the audacity to claim that they support or will abide by this contract? It sounds like propaganda lifted straight out of 1984 — “freedom is slavery” and “ignorance is strength”.
throwawaysea 7y ago
No thanks, this seems like it is asking governments and companies to adopt specific political positions and policies. This seems less like saving a “neutral” web and more like creating an ideological one. For example: > Establishing policies designed to respect and promote the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those pertaining to education, gender equality, systematically excluded groups, climate, and socio-environmental justice.
nojvek 7y ago
Hasn’t he always had a plan to save the web? What’s one dude supposed to do against an army of close to trillion dollars mega corporations with millions of machines and tens of thousands of engineers whose sole purpose is to build models of their users and spam ads? Feels like ladila-feel-good article.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
FerretFred 7y ago
I can't help thinking that although it's a worthy cause it won't make any substantial headway as gov/com have infiltrated the current Internet so pervasively. What we'll end up with is something like the United Nations: shiny, shouty but ultimately ineffective. I think what we'll also end up with is an "underground" Internet of the type that's always seen in dystopian SciFi.
sproketboy 7y ago
The principles https://contractfortheweb.org/ https://contractfortheweb.org/ don't mention free speech. FAIL.

149 points by edward 7y ago

vojnovski 7y ago

Link to the Plan (or Contract as it's being called): https://contractfortheweb.org/ https://contractfortheweb.org/

generalpass 7y ago
When I saw that all I could think, "Newt Gingrich, is that you?"
leppr 7y ago
The site's GDPR pop-up doesn't allow opt-out of tracking. What a great example to set for the web.
- chopin 7y ago
  And phones home to a bunch of Google sites. I think we can safely ignore this.

PaulHoule 7y ago

It is good that he is talking about people, their motivations, their rights, their responsibilities, than about technology. (e.g. "Technology X is going to save us")

woodandsteel 7y ago

I like the principles, but I am pessimistic he can persuade the tech companies and many of the governments (China, Russia, Iran, for instance) to adopt them. That's because they have such strong motivations to keep things as they are, and even make them worse.

lggdn 7y ago
Why single out China, Russia, Iran? > That's because they have such strong motivations to keep things as they are, and even make them worse. And the EU, Britain, US, etc don't? I know it's hard to believe, the leader of internet censorship isn't in China, Russia or Iran. It's in europe. "Germany’s Online Crackdowns Inspire the World’s Dictators" https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdowns-inspired-the-worlds-dictators-russia-venezuela-india/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdow... And the leaders of tech censorship isn't in China, it's in the US since major tech companies are in the US.
- sadness2 7y ago
  > And the leaders of tech censorship isn't in China, it's in the US since major tech companies are in the US. This is like saying Iran is the biggest polluter because they produce oil.

Aeolun 7y ago

Does anyone mind me being skeptical if this plan has been signed by Google, MS and Facebook from the start? These all sound very nice, but I don’t think there’s any company or government that would claim not to do these things.

LeoPanthera 7y ago
Agreed. Does Google and Facebook "signing" it mean they agree to abide buy the plan? If not, signing it means nothing. If so, then either they are lying, or the plan imposes so few restrictions that it is worthless.
- fourthark 7y ago
  The article says they will be kicked out if they don’t abide by the contract. We’ll see if that actually happens.
  - larnmar 7y ago
    Almost all the points are deliberately left so vague that almost anyone can claim that they’re abiding with them. A goodly number of points are also left so vague that almost anyone can claim that their opponent isn’t abiding by them, providing a perfect environment for anarcho-tyranny.
  - harry8 7y ago
    "We were excited to support their stated goals but have now resigned as we disgaree strongly with the way they have changed their focus and departed from sense to something wholly unworkable which makes us all sad." --googbrick 2 sweeps: 1) How many of those words will actually be meaningfully different when their statements are released? 2) When will they pull the trigger to make that happen?
    - harry8 7y ago
      Option (b) is of course regulatory capture whereby googbrick innoculate themesleves from any meanigful future competition. They'll definitely try that and will embrace totally if they can make it work in some financially meanigful way in their favour. Does Berners-Lee have any form in policy? Did he have genuine inventive insight or just right place right time permissive license? These are genuine questions I'm asking to which I don't have answers - maybe he's saved the web before, and his inventive insight was utterly brilliant for all I know?

wesammikhail 7y ago

In my opinion, any form of action that is based on a political or social arrangement is doomed to fail as it is subject to hijacking at best. Any potential solution(s) has to be routed in actual technological changes that are backed by well designed protocols that cannot be changed over night or misused in the benefit of whomever wields the stick at any given point.All else is waste of time. That´s just my 2 cents though!

a3n 7y ago
Yeah, but you do have to try. The political and social arrangement of the U.S. Constitution, for example, is worth trying to preserve. It will only endure if most of us, and our leaders, agree to follow it. Most such arrangements are shared illusions that are doomed, unless we agree to follow them. It really boils down to that, because we are all fundamentally free to act as selfish savages of we want.
ebcode 7y ago
But the internet is a political and social arrangement. It's easy to forget in cyberspace the very physical situation of electrons and photons moving through wires and air. All this exists in pipes on the surface of the earth, in satellites overhead, and in undersea cables. These are all owned by somebody, or some thing. If you want to really get at the root causes of the issues TBL is raising, you're going to have to address the idea of private property. TBL isn't doing that (as far as I can tell), and so of course everyone (and thing) is on board.

mirimir 7y ago

> Three more principles call on individuals to create rich and relevant content to make the web a valuable place, build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome, and finally, to fight for the web, so it remains open to everyone, everywhere. The "build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome" point seems impossibly idealistic. And indeed, for lack of a better word, boring. I'd rather have a diversity of communities, run however they choose. If someone doesn't feel "safe and welcome", they can just go away. Also, from https://contractfortheweb.org/ https://contractfortheweb.org/: > 1. By working towards a more inclusive Web: > a. Adopting best practices on civil discourse online and educating the next generation on these matters. Why must all discourse be "civil"? I mean, that's a value here at HN. But it's not one for the chans. So shouldn't people have the right to choose? > b. Committing to amplify the messages of systematically excluded groups, and standing up for them when they are being targeted or abused. I can't help laughing at this. Because I'm like 99% sure that they aren't including neo-Nazis here. Or even the incels who aren't even vaguely neo-Nazi. Anyway, in my ideal internet, everyone could post whatever they want, as anonymously as they want, and as resistant to takedown as they want. And everyone else could choose what to access.

goatinaboat 7y ago
strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome A “strong” community necessarily has members and non-members, insiders and outsiders. If it doesn’t it’s not a community in any meaningful sense, it’s just an amorphous crowd. The idea of a community that welcomes everyone literally is a contradiction in terms.
- krapp 7y ago
  If you think of the internet, as a whole, as a single "community" then you're right - and I think it would be infeasible to apply a particular moral or ethical (and inevitably cultural and political) standard at that level, since "the internet" literally encompasses all of humanity. But if the internet is seen for what it is, a network of networks and the web a community of communities then there's no paradox - if one is not comfortable or welcomed in one community, one can move to, or start, another community that more accepting. But then, that allows for exactly the sort of toxic and abusive communities and users that TBL and many others believe are "destroying" the web. And they're kind of correct, but not because these communities exist, per se, or because the 'wrong sorts of people' are allowed to use the web, but because visibility and dialogue has been mostly centralized along a few large platforms with disproportionate influence, and as a result of the effect of SEO and social media algorithms, much of the diversity of the web has been filtered out for the sake of extremist and commercial content.

kyledrake 7y ago

If he really wants to save the web, maybe start by reversing the insane decision on EME DRM that allowed it to turn into a secret vote at the W3C https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-controversy-w3c-greenlights-drm-web https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-con... I'm really sick of these "influencers" doing horrible things and then coming back and expecting us to give them blank checks as defenders of the web, when they only seem to do the right thing when it's convenient for them. Get your own house in order before coming out and trying to fix everybody else's.

bArray 7y ago
Agreed, I think Tim has gone off the deep end. The time to be vocal about the future direction of the web was in the wake of the dot com bubble. I think this is just a case of him trying to secure his legacy.
- rangibaby 7y ago
  "I think this is just a case of him trying to secure his legacy." I think that's a bit harsh. His invention is one of the greatest of all time, that's quite a legacy
  - w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago
    Agree. The greatest invention since the printing machine by Gutenberg.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    His invention is one of the greatest of all time I am not saying I would have done any better than him in the circumstances but let’s be honest: TBL didn’t invent hypertext and the WWW is just a poor knock-off of Englebart’s ideas. It has taken millions of people decades to turn the WWW into something that can be secured and scaled and actually be useful to ordinary people. TBL was in the right place at the right time but don’t overestimate his actual contribution. http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/158/90/ http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/158/90/

kd3 7y ago

Principles on paper won't work. We need to build these principles into the technology at a fundamental level so that anyone using it can't do anything else but use it based on those principles. The technology should require it and not be able to work otherwise unless you break it.

a3n 7y ago
No tech is fool proof, although we should always try for the practical best. But, say our current tech is as good as we know how to make it. Data breaches, for example, would be much less s problem if we held relevant people accountable for due care. Who was the last CxO who went to jail, or was even criminally investigated and found innocent, for a data breach into their org? Or a perpetrator, for that matter?
- kd3 7y ago
  In the long term "laws" won't work. What we see throughout history is that they never work and those who are elected to see to it that it works themselves are corrupt. The best option is to code it in the technology. For example, we can make laws and regulation to see to it that governments don't take more debt or print more money than they should in order not to cause inflation and economic crisis, but what we've seen throughout history is that this never works in the long term. The better solution was the one Satoshi came up with: program the fixed amount of currency into the Bitcoin technology with computational and mathematical checks. Now it's extremely difficult to do anything else unless you can somehow control or convince the majority of the nodes to accept it. The same kind of solutions should be developed for the web.

gremlinsinc 7y ago

What if there were a way to create some sort of centralized/decentralized identity store... where anyone wanting access to your information would have to request it, you then supply them a 'key' to gain access...like a pgp key... they can then use your data for business purposes that you allow... you can destroy keys at will so you ALWAYS have the means to shut off a business who's abusing your information, or you could drop off the entire grid by basically revoking all keys... This would apply to images as well with your likeness (ai-made or w/e)...though I'm not sure how you'd enforce that, unless the protocol also did facial reck/search online notifying you of images of you, that you can then force to be taken offline through legal means. Of course there's the argument of who owns the copyright -- the person in the picture or the photographer even if they took photo w/ or without your permission/knowledge...etc... I'm not sure how this would work in the wild, and it's just a concept idea... It would be nice though in the case of a true dystopian future to be able to pull yourself off the grid easier than it is today.

ss3000 7y ago
I have also pondered on variations of this idea of users _owning_ their own data and only granting access to their data to apps they trust, as a means to counter the status quo of every company holding users' data hostage in their own walled gardens and preventing data mobility between apps. However, the one thing that I've always struggled with is how to handle apps that need write access to users' data in order to be useful. For instance, a messaging app needs to be able to write new messages onto the user-owned data store, but if we allow arbitrary reads/writes to some namespaced path to the store, an app simply needs to encrypt the data with some secret key that the user doesn't know in order to build a decentralized walled garden that stifles data mobility in the same way that centralized walled gardens do today.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  Sometimes problems are better solved legally rather than technically. You could spend all year thinking of a way to prevent this or you could just have a law that states that users must have access to machine readable copies of all the data you collect about them. To a computer there is very little you can do to distinguish between obfuscated and regular data but to a human/legal system the difference is clear.

buboard 7y ago

Want to save the web quick? Enable 402 Payment Required through some form of digital wallet that will allow anonymized payments. The lack of payment streams is the biggest driver of garbage

tzs 7y ago
A big problem with sites being paid directly by users is how to treat that transaction legally. It may require the site to register as a business in every jurisdiction it has paying visitors, collect taxes for each jurisdiction, and comply with each jurisdiction’s consumer protection, privacy, and content restriction laws. I don’t think you will see any large scale movement to micropayments until at least the EU and the various US states change their legal frameworks for digital goods to characterize these transactions as being solely under the jurisdiction of where the site resides.
- Mengkudulangsat 7y ago
  Just like how the real world has shadow-banking to serve the marginalized, so should the internet. I'm keen on the idea that a vibrant portion of internet commerce should be opaque to governments. Perhaps not the best place to start a formal business in; where you have to think about accounting and taxes, but it will be a boon for ad-hoc informal businesses. I'd like to think of it as facilitating the primordial soup that will give rise to new ways of doing things.
  - ddalex 7y ago
    I've seen postit notes in London advertising (illegal) weed sale by chatting on encrypted messenger and paying with crypto coin. Both attempts to keep the authorities in shadow. Add this to the black markets for exploits, data dump leaks, and skimmed CC info - I'd say that certainly there is a healthy shadow market on the webz out there. The only thing - it's not as visible as it was, say, 10 years ago, when Silk Road was well known, and we all know how that ended.
- buboard 7y ago
  not just a problem, it is THE problem. It can be done, perhaps by having a browser wallet with a limit $/person/month, and the transactions can be verifiable, but anonymous. Tax systems from 2 centuries ago do not serve us well anymore

geowwy 7y ago

> Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone > 1. By crafting policies that address the needs of systematically excluded > groups > a. Designing gender responsive and inclusive data plans targeting women and > other systematically excluded groups. What's he suggesting? Give women discounted internet?

function_seven 7y ago
For mobile users: > Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone > 1. By crafting policies that address the needs of systematically excluded groups > a. Designing gender responsive and inclusive data plans targeting women and other systematically excluded groups
- tedunangst 7y ago
  So which gender gets the most data?
bArray 7y ago
> What's he suggesting? The fact that it is ambiguous leaves room for it to mean whatever the controlling party wants it to mean. As long as people can't agree on something as fundamental as the goal, it's doomed to fail. > Give women discounted internet? Somehow I don't think he was suggesting a "pink tax" or some kind of "ladies internet" that filters some explicit pictures. I think "inclusive" roughly translates as favorable in sentences like these. Surely the fact that the internet is the exact same price for everybody, regardless of group characteristics, is the ultimate goal? I don't think it is sensible to begin adding bias where there currently is none.
- mirimir 7y ago
  > Somehow I don't think he was suggesting a "pink tax" or some kind of "ladies internet" that filters some explicit pictures. It's my impression that the price of internet access is at least somewhat proportional to local cost of living. And I don't see why there shouldn't be income-based discounts. But, perhaps bizarrely enough, I do think that filtered internet access is a very sensible idea. I mean, it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access by their underage children. HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users can manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe search" settings. So why not let users set that up at the ISP level?

symplee 7y ago

At some point doesn't it becomes easier to start anew Vs. trying to derail the ten trillion-dollar freight-train momentum of the current Internet?

crazygringo 7y ago

I'm sorry, but this just sounds like a bunch of feel-good babble that isn't taking anything seriously. Free speech? Fundamental rights? "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"? Yes, these are all good things. But also all in deep, fundamental conflict with each other. Moral and political philosophers have been debating how to resolve them for centuries... and the disagreements are just as strong as ever. His plan isn't taking any strong stances at all, which would involve actually making decisions between competing values. Instead, he's just trying to have it all -- which sounds good, but provides zero actionable guidance.

lggdn 7y ago
It's even worse than feel-good babble. It's signaling TBL's shift from advocating a decentralized free internet towards a centralized censored internet. "Free speech? Fundamental rights?" are what we want, but people who claim to want free speech and then claim they want "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"? ultimately mean that they want censorship. It's basically what happened to social media and the internet. Remember that everyone from Reddit to Zuckerburg to news companies claimed they supported free speech a decade ago. Then money/politics/etc got involved and they started talking about ""Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"?" and we have a censored dystopia on our hands. In china, they use "harmony" as a propaganda tool to justify censorship. In the west, we use "civility" along with "best in humanity", "universal human rights", etc to justify censorship.
- 72deluxe 7y ago
  I suppose it comes down to who defines "the best" or what good and bad is. Your definition most likely won't be the same as mine. Times that by 6 billion (and different cultural attitudes in different lands) and it's obvious we will never always agree. The World Wide Web won't solve the differences between people. I think we should stop pretending it will, or expecting too much of a collection of computer-served XML. That's all it is, fundamentally. I would probably say that politics and social movements should stay out of this serving of XML, as you can't keep all of the people happy all of the time, so why try? Increasingly the machines we use are sending data back instead of serving us, frustratingly.

GoForthAssemble 7y ago

Most of these answers make me think FAANG staff are a bit omnipresent on HN nowadays. You know he, standing on Vert's shoulders, invented the flipping WWW right? You know better and are trying to do what about it exactly?? Oh yeah, make money.

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

I see it's backed by Microsoft, Google and Facebook, which means it's either impotent or horrible.

agotterer 7y ago

We can start by preventing ads that highjack pages and redirect to undesirable locations. I tried three times to read the article on my phone and was redirected to other sites.

zzo38computer 7y ago
Yes, and that is part of what is stupid in the web browser design; the design of the software, and of the W3C standards, need to be improved.

zzo38computer 7y ago

We will need to support not breaking the internet; the web is just a part of that. Still, they should fix it by making W3C specifications so that it doesn't have the stupid stuff (because there is a lot of stupid stuff in it now); but, also is needed to protect free and open internet too, which is separate but related (and will help to save the web too, although it won't do it by itself because there are other issues than internet involved). Such as, ensure that internet packets can be freely distributed (to their intended destination) without tampering, if they follow the transport-layer protocols (application-layer protocols, such as HTTP(S), is not the job of the ISP to enforce; you can use any application-layer protocols on any port numbers in either direction (it is the job only of the two end points (client and server) to block the packets they don't want, and not anyone else)). The issues specific to web is to improve the web browser software (a lot of the stuff is stupid designs, I think). For internet, ensure you can be part of internet.

danschumann 7y ago

IMO, news serves the same purpose as zip files... A concise yet accurate representation of the whole. What we have today is curve fitting of events to a narrative, taking only the sentences which create a permutation to support the bias, not seeking summation. And/or the curve fits an emotional goal(ie to scare readers into action). But we can measure zip's efficiency, but it's harder to measure the true accuracy of events when summarizing, because different points are of varying levels of importance to different people. This has led me to pay attention to the signal and ignore the noise; watching the full speeches, and viewing the sources myself, but most people aren't so inclined, they just shriek & rage, baited by an inaccurate context shrinker. Thus, we have hyper informed people who watch full context, as well as severely misinformed folks, getting bad recaps. It is like the income disparity gap with information.

HerpDerpLerp 7y ago
IAmVerySmart

cmdshiftf4 7y ago

6 months ago Berners-Lee was claiming to be on the road to rolling out Web 2.0, a de-centralized protocol we'd all jump on to be free of this cruft. Fast-forward to now and his new scheme is a sort of UN for Web 1.0? And, like the UN, one that is totally powerless beyond sternly written letters and is governed by some of the greatest infringers of the very rights it's claiming to protect? I'm going to assume he isn't as naive as one would have to be to blindly push such a doomed-to-fail proposition, so on the same assumption this has to be some sort of fight for relevancy or mere publicity.

infectoid 7y ago

What happened to TBL's other project where everything was supposed to be decentralised? https://solid.mit.edu https://solid.mit.edu Is it dead?

rapnie 7y ago
It is not dead, but also not progressing very fast. I think low adoption rate is their biggest hurdle, and subsequent lack of network effects in the development community. Solid based on a bunch of Linked Data standards which find most traction in small academic circles. Few sexy applications or good libraries to build from. The Gitter channels are apparently most active. Web: https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ Forum: https://forum.solidproject.org/ https://forum.solidproject.org/ Gitter channels, etc: https://github.com/solid/information/blob/master/gitter-chat-overview.md https://github.com/solid/information/blob/master/gitter-chat... Repo: https://github.com/solid/solid https://github.com/solid/solid
Vinnl 7y ago
It's not dead! It's just no longer at MIT (as is also mentioned on the website you linked). Tim founded a startup called inrupt (disclosure: I work there, opinions my own) that aims to stimulate commercial adoption. The links in the sibling comment by rapnie are an excellent place to start.
- pdimitar 7y ago
  How does an organisation even stimulate others to adopt Solid? I cannot imagine your daily activities. Can you elaborate, assuming you would be comfortable to do so?
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    I can't disclose everything (I'm not involved with all the parts of the company), but the most important way in which I contribute to that is by building developer tooling and writing documentation for engineers looking to write apps on Solid.

SllX 7y ago

If you care one wit about saving the web, then you will recognize that both the best and the worst of humanity will continue to coexist on the web so long as they continue to exist within humanity. That does not mean that from a policy or prosecutorial perspective we should not continue to investigate and prosecute crimes as they occur, but crime will occur, and the best we can do is work to protect ourselves and others. That means security and privacy and cryptography. Now there is the question, does the web need to be saved? I’m open to discussing whether it does, but the problem with this assertion is that it has never been easier to build and host a website containing all that you can legally host. If there are problems, they are legal, not technical. You can host webshit or family photos or pornography or your blog or a list of links to your favorite websites or a collection of selfies or a review site or a private reddit clone or your class notes or some personal research or any number of other things, because I could sit here all night typing out examples and probably find out of Hacker News has a character limit in the process. You can serve JavaScript or ads or well designed style sheets or really really bad style sheets they make the blink tag look positively understated, or you can serve plain Jane HTML or even plainer text files, or even PDFs or DOCs or DOCX files or videos or sounds or any number of other binaries. I’m not sure entirely what we’ve lost besides the websites that the owners have chosen not to host any longer. People have made bad choices about where to host the only copies of something they loved and built and hosted on someone else’s server, only to see those sites shut down, and will probably continue to make such choices. This is fine, an integral part of liberty is to have the ability to source enough rope to hang yourself with. Enjoy the things you have now, for nothing lasts forever. Make that which you would like to see more of to seed the world and inspire others.

newscracker 7y ago

Google, Facebook and Microsoft are supporters of this? And do their names have to come before many others in the list? Do these companies now have the audacity to claim that they support or will abide by this contract? It sounds like propaganda lifted straight out of 1984 — “freedom is slavery” and “ignorance is strength”.

throwawaysea 7y ago

No thanks, this seems like it is asking governments and companies to adopt specific political positions and policies. This seems less like saving a “neutral” web and more like creating an ideological one. For example: > Establishing policies designed to respect and promote the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those pertaining to education, gender equality, systematically excluded groups, climate, and socio-environmental justice.

nojvek 7y ago

Hasn’t he always had a plan to save the web? What’s one dude supposed to do against an army of close to trillion dollars mega corporations with millions of machines and tens of thousands of engineers whose sole purpose is to build models of their users and spam ads? Feels like ladila-feel-good article.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

FerretFred 7y ago

I can't help thinking that although it's a worthy cause it won't make any substantial headway as gov/com have infiltrated the current Internet so pervasively. What we'll end up with is something like the United Nations: shiny, shouty but ultimately ineffective. I think what we'll also end up with is an "underground" Internet of the type that's always seen in dystopian SciFi.

sproketboy 7y ago

The principles https://contractfortheweb.org/ https://contractfortheweb.org/ don't mention free speech. FAIL.