'Father of Internet' calls on users to defend it
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet, in an interview with the Guardian published on 12th March, 2014, calls for the creation of an online Magna Carta. His reason for the need of this bill of rights is to protect and enshrine the independence of the medium he created.
Exactly 25 years after he wrote the first draft of the first proposal or what would become the internet and the medium of communication, journalism and entertainment the computer scientist told the Guardian, "We need a global constitution – a bill of rights." His comments come in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about how the NSA Is practically undermining all that he conceived the internet as by their mass surveillance of the medium.
In 1989, Berners-Lee submitted a paper entitled 'Information management: a proposal'. His idea was to form a system of interlinked documents which could be stored in a variety of locations. He also conceived what would become the web browser in his proposal of a medium to view these documents. 25 years on, browsers are the gateway to the World Wide Web and the internet has grown to accommodate not just interlinked documents but every possible thing imaginable.
But it wasn’t until 1991 the first web pages began to appear. General appeal of these pages were limited, but what they set in motion would be transformed in two years. In 1993, the web browser Mosaic brought Berners-Lee’s creation mainstream.
As more and more people joined the internet, the fury of user including the invertor is understandable when it had come under attack from governments. Berners-Lee’s proposal comes as a savior to the "open, neutral" system.
In the London 2012 Olympics, Berners-Lee typed the words "this is for everyone" on a computer in the centre of the arena. Since inventing the web 25 years ago, he has been adamant on the principle of openness, inclusivity and democracy. His vision of the internet as a tool belonging to everyone was further ground into reality with the invention of Google.
Sites such as Yahoo! had created searchable directories of the web, but Google managed to make itself the gateway to the internet. The foundations of this future was laid in 1996 and the ball started rolling in 1998 when it went live. Now Google, can claim to be the gateway to the internet, with its smartphone software, cloud drives, maps and most importantly the vast trove of data that it presented to whoever wanted access. As the Guardian says, “The web became less of a library, and more of an encyclopedia; the default place to turn to for any item of knowledge.”
And now that this openness is under threat with every move on the internet, the bastion of free speech monitored and open to probing, Berners-Lee says, "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."
One of most high profile critics of the American and British spy agencies' surveillance of citizens, the web inventor’s "web we want" campaign 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 according to the Guardian.
The fight between privacy and free speech and the alleged security concerns has been a long one. Since journalism moved to the web, and agencies have used it as a medium to voice concerns, raise debated and bring to light government wrong-doings, there have attempts to gag it.
“In April 2010, Wikileaks made the first release from the cache of documents it had received from Bradley Manning. "Collateral murder"showed a US army helicopter firing on civilians. Later that year, the US embassy cables made public a vast trove of diplomatic memos, destabilising governments all over the world,” the Guardian says in its interactive history of the internet.
Two years later Sopa and Pipa were proposed US legislations. Though a lot of people called internet cencorship, the Stop Online Piracy act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act proponents said would protect copyright owners. Wikipedia, the collaborative encyclopedia of the internet took it so seriously it went on strike for a day. Thankfully both the bills did not make it.
Now the very medium through which millions voiced their rights of free speech is under threat more than ever. Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing brought to light the undermining of encryption, web security, mass collection of user’s metadata and more. Berners-Lee’s vision of the internet as he saw it as a tool for openness is under attack.
His call of the Magna Carta of the internet echo the principles of privacy, free speech and responsible anonymity. "These issues have crept up on us," Berners-Lee said to the Guardian in his interview. "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."
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