With great power comes great responsibility. This has never been more true than it is with the ongoing evolution of the Internet.
The Web's creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, advocated for Internet security, freedom and privacy on Tuesday, as he announced the advent of his campaign to set up a bill of rights for the Web, a Magna Carta, if you will.
Berners-Lee, a longtime champion of the Internet's ability to do good, believes that it is essential to protect the openness and freedom of the Web. In the past decade, Internet use has skyrocketed and with it, government controls and surveillance programs. Berners-Lee is determined to prevent the destruction of the democratic tool he created 25 years ago.
"Now, 25 years on, Web users are realizing they need human rights on the Web," Berners-Lee said. "We need independence of the Web for democracy, we need independence of the Web to be able to support the press, we need independence of the Web in general. It's becoming very important to sort out all that."
Issues of Internet security and privacy were raised by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who exposed the U.S. government's extensive, mass collection of data last year. Snowden, who spoke at South by Southwest on Monday about the need for increased Internet security, was praised by Berners-Lee for his service to making the Web - and the world - a better place.
"These issues have crept up on us," Berners-Lee said. "Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the Web we want for the next 25 years."
Berners-Lee believes that one of the first rights we should add to the Web Magna Carta is protection for whistle blowers like Snowden.
"When [systems] break the whistle blower is the person who saves society by pointing out something that nobody else will, because it's illegal," he said. "One thing I'd like to see built in the future is an international convention and international respect for whistle blowers."
The openness of the Internet is directly tied to the endurance of democracy, says Berners-Lee. Ideally, he would like to see strong restrictions on government interference with Web neutrality and freedom.
"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. It's not naive to think we can have that, but it is naive to think we can just sit back and get it," he said.
Although Berners-Lee argues that the government should not interfere too much with the Internet, he does recognize the need of oversight. However, instead of enacting restrictive laws and surveilling innocent Web users without their knowledge or permission, he believes that governments should simply enforce the Web bill of rights, to ensure that the Web remains a source of all that is good, rather than all that is evil.
"The key thing is getting people to fight for the Web and to see the harm that a fractured Web would bring," he said. "Like any human system, the Web needs policing and of course we need national laws, but we must not turn the network into a series of national silos."
