You may have seen some of the publicity about the idea of a Bill of Rights or Magna Carta for the World Wide Web. Sir Tim Berners Lee was talking about it the other day.I like the concept but I am unsure what it would include. Would it be a universal right of access? Would it be strict laws preventing governments or big business from controlling it? If the latter, how would you protect people from abusive or dangerous content?
The Web is an extension of free speech. When I proposed the Lords of the Blog some years ago now I described it as a ‘meeting room without walls’ but like all aspects of free speech there are limits – you are not free to shout “fire” in a crowded cinema to use the old example.
So, to those who take an interest in these matters could we devise a Bill of Rights for the Web? These concepts can be very important. The Bill of Rights and Magna Carta were both landmark achievements – not just for this country but also for the wider world.
Comments please.
PS For all those who are still commenting on my Syria/Crimea post below there is going to be a debate on Ukraine next Tuesday – I hope to be speaking and will post again.
If a “Magna Carta” style document were to be drafted, then apart from hopefully lasting a bit longer than its namesake, which was scrapped almost immediately, I would suggest that having such a document specific to the internet would be a short term idea, and hence a bad one.
It would be almost impossible to design a document that is both sufficiently open to new technology developments, while also enshrining principles that should not be overturned, even if to do so in the future might be beneficial.
There is also the difficulty that if a repressive government doesn’t like the internet, then just as the Barons of old, they will simply rip it up and write their own one.
Rather better might be a more generic “right to information” type of UN declaration where it is stated that citizens of any country should have access to information without hindrance, but done in a manner than also respects the different legal, social and moral codes that exist where the citizen lives.
There shouldn’t be a need to lock it down to “the internet”, or any other technology, and therefore needs to be technology neutral. Talk of net-neutrality is a bad one for example, as there are some reasons traffic shaping can be a good thing for the consumer, and a bill of rights banning it could kill off long term developments that benefit the end users.
Regulating the technology in a flexible manner is best, and “Magna Carta” type declarations tend to hinder fast moving technologies.
Much better to have a general statement of principles, and leave the technology out of it.
The difference between the U.S. Bill of Rights and that of most other modern bills is that the first ten or so amendments to the Constitution are clearly at the base of a system of legal enforcement and protection. The British Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta and the Parliament Act form something more procedural (though our assurance has many procedural elements and your three have some that are not procedural) but it is tied deeply to real political and legal action. Is that realistic here? Can a WWW Bill of Rights really have legal force not only against the lawful and cooperative but to some real degree in favor of or against anyone who comes along?
I don’t know about fires in cinemas but i do know about a bolting horse thru an open door.
Linnux attempted to pave the way for freedom whilst Microsoft campaigned for mega-profits, with copyright monopoly, more than 15 years ago. The sudden loss of copyright and “royalty” was fiercely contested by corporations like iTunes, who now have the finest digital delivery for music, and Amazon for digital Audible and “kindle” books.
Few others compete effectively. We hear little of Linnux today.
That is the programming side of things, but if you control the programs, you surely control the content as well?
The ability to enter the programs of other people, like listening to phone hacks 30 years ago, is an unusual skill, which Snowden, Assange, and Manning, are said to have done. Their prosecution probably only represent the desire of the state to set an example of what NOT to do, and have probably committed no crime at all. Some criminal law is enacted with no examples of it, in the past and none ever are prosecuted, so one wonders what the value of the Act is?!!!
The police and the military have supreme powers to do whatever they like with
anybody’s computer, or even radio, or Television reception, so there is not much can be done about that. My own experience is of a near neighbor, who claims to have the right to listen, and does, to ALL my conversations, using a remote listening device, whether in bed , or at the front gate, since his wife is a VIPolice inspector. RLDs(Remote listening devices) according to my sound engineer adviser are now heat seeking devices, and not noise seeking devices at all.
Anything as intrusive, if not downright criminal, as that, brings the WWW into perspective! It amounts to an unashamed theft of my personal space.
The same applies to W3(World Wide Web).
Would it be strict laws preventing governments or big business from controlling it? If the latter, how would you protect people from abusive or dangerous content?Govts and big business do control it, every single pixel and nano-byte of it.
Law already exists to prevent corruption by way of photography (sexual offences) or incitement (terrorism), and they apply to the forms of digital copy every bit as much as to hard copy, which might have been used in the past.
As I see it, the big problem is not with the delivery of content, or its transmission, but with the “minds” of those who use it, and mass literacy.
It is not whether it is digital or hard copy, but the fact that everybody in the world can read what IS transmitted!
W3 does not change anything.
A Nation state which restricts the use of W3, might be infringing Human Rights, but would claim that Civil Rights are being upheld in doing so. The converse may also be true. Either way it would be difficult to prosecute.
I would point out that Linux is far more pervasive than you might think. Most home routers run a flavour of it, Android, as used in phones, is a derivative, even modern TVs may well claim to be running it if you poke around the menu system enough. It is popular for embedded precisely because it provides a starting point that doesn’t attract any sort of royalty to anyone for using it.
Anyway, to the point. A Bill of Rights is a nice idea in principle but how would one implement it in practice? Either it has to be so restrictive to be unacceptable to those who believe in completely free speech or it doesn’t prevent things that some people consider unacceptable. Some parts of the world will block websites if someone posts something considered offensive to certain people or religions. The UK had a recent brush with a law that would have effectively removed the right to cause offence that rightly failed to make it onto the books.
How would a Bill of Rights handle conflicts between legal systems? If a US resident puts something on a US website that is perfectly legal under US law, but is readable by someone in another country where it is illegal, what happens? For a real world example, consider what happens when a judge in the UK grants an injunction naming a celebrity. If you’re resident in the UK and publish that name or, presumably, are overseas and publish it on a UK-based website, then you’re in breach of that injunction. If you’re outside the UK and you publish that name on a non-UK site which is (by the nature of the internet) readable by people in the UK, what happens? We end up in the absurd situation where everyone in the UK knows the name but are not allowed to mention it. I would argue that the law in many countries needs to understand the nature of the internet.
The other thing that is creeping in to the UK is the concept of censorship of websites. It’s creeping in because someone is wailing “please think of the children” and calling for blanket censorship of sites. I am thinking of my child, which is why I oppose censorship because it will spread to other forms of ‘undesirable’ content if it’s allowed to take root. If my son finds something dubious on the internet, the correct response is not to sweep it under the carpet and pretend it did not happen, but to educate him about what he’s seen and why it’s there, and that if he comes across such material he’s welcome to come and talk to his parents about it. Incidentally, did you know there’s such a thing as Super Mario porn?
Bravo! Lord Soley,
but alas! we are already confined by your notwithstandingly-innocent, and apparently-core-relevant scrutiny questions,
which are very possibly
(and, to the Mind of the likes of me, quite probably}
“blocking out” primary multiway participatively-cooperative democratic facts-sharing and discussion,
already ‘bums-rushing’ us into habitually-blinkered “democratic-debating”
{and I’m surely not shouting “Fire!” here, am I ?}
It’s oligarchically even unilaterally “cornering”
the question-writing and thereby the Agenda
for dealing with
1) the Whole Field of Human Rights & thereby the Needs of all Wider EarthLifeSupports
2) our still failing, stuck-in-the-mud, pre-existential Cooperatively Participatory ‘People-Upwards’ Democratic-Discussion
[which should essentially precede any form of Debating and Decision-Making]
3) Other major Factors
[such as “How Many People Can Live On Planet Earth ?”, “Doomsday 2010”, and “How Much Is Any Human Being Actually ‘Worth’ ?”]
4) How Best and Most Affordably Can Multiway Participatory Democracy be both founded and constitutionally propagated and effectively administered Worldwide
[and ‘longest-term’ maybe even carried to our future Offsprings’ Earth2 planet, once we/they have found it and Techno-Starfleet-achieved ‘colonising’ It ?
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And then maybe we would be ready to start working upon this particular core-essential
of the lifesupportively-extant
but seriously under iatrogenicly-crippling attack
“Multiway Human-Needs Meeting Place Without Walls”,
namely “our” www. worldwide web.
JSDM. 1037F140314.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
I note from Wiki the distinction of the two W3 and internet as follows:
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the web is one of the services that runs on the Internet. It is a collection of text documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, usually accessed by web browsers from web servers. In short, the web can be thought of as an application “running” on the Internet
W3, about which Lord Soley is speaking, is principally methods of documentation.
A Bill of Rights about what may be written on a System of documents such as that would surely be no better than anything that has ever been done to prevent or allow documents to be published? Prosecuting for breaching rights has until now been done in US courts with limited success.
Where would an International Bill of Rights be upheld?
Maybe it’s just me, but Mr Berners-Lee appeared a touch ambiguous in his post, ending with:
“On the 25th birthday of the web, I ask you to join in—to help us imagine and build the future standards for the web, and to press for every country to develop a digital bill of rights to advance a free and open web for everyone.”*
There is no clear call for every country to join together and develop a Bill, leaving an option for every country to develop its own Bill. Probably wise, given the way internet governance has been going; a world government won’t be established by sitting disparate groups in one room.
* http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/on-25th-anniversary-of-web-lets-keep-it.html
Why not tell it like it is? Governments are not at all worried about porn or any other downright unholy output of the internet as a whole. What they fear is loss of control over the news which feeds the population of the world. it reduces their power to sell the kind of propaganda we are given on a daily basis to swallow.
What they are looking for is a way to manipulate what is heard and seen world wide that affects their position to control. And thank goodness it is not as easy to slap it down the way they want. Because, once they have found a way to regulate and censor we will be back in the hands of mental defectives. Or, more likely, the mentally bent. Porn is horrendous but it keeps the plebs happy as they believe they are, at last, allowed to develop fantasy. Not to mention it’s a big money maker and officials have an interest in keeping that going. It may interest people in this country to know that since way way back in the sixties or before, porn cinemas were on the high street in LA where you could purchase tickets for a few dollars and although it was only 18’s to get in, that was a rule that they knew wouldn’t stand up, and it didn’t. So, they are simply spreading what has been out there in the land of the free for nearly a century.
The complaints coming from parents as their kids are being bombarded daily and intentionally which is now getting louder. Why do I say intentionally, because the forces of government can cut the feed in an instant to any site they want to. Which clearly they do not want to in these cases.
So this spread of indignation is another way of stirring up public ideas to enable more censorship by a call of the people, because it is an official pet project to deny us knowledge of their thievery. It has nothing at all to do with morality or any other aspect of fear toward polluting the nation with name calling or whatever. It is a scam to control what we see and hear about them and their carry on. If they were worried about morality the place to start would be advertising of all kinds. TV advertising is insanely exploitative with lies and fraudulent information and they know it. See anyone at all calling to eliminate that from the children of our nation? We all know if we are not careful with the select button you will be bombarded ad hoc with the enormous intimate areas of sleazy sex workers on our night screens as they writhe in demented desire for the caller she pretends is on the loosely held phone. As if kids don’t turn that on when parents are sleeping. Yet, when it comes to news coverage it is entirely scrutinised before being fed through to those who report it. Don’t think so? Think we have pure unadulterated news stories? This little revelation should put you in no doubts about that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esPFcykoTxo
And Piers Morgan was dumped, wasn’t he? Wonder why?.
And one more piece of news on this, our masters of morality in the land of the free have already passed a bill taking over the full right to censor anything they like. Why do you think so many Americans are reading British newspapers on the net and commenting on them to the chagrin of British readers. It’s because their internet outlets are highly careful of what they can say and address and respond to freely. So the poodle (GB) is told to get in step with global policy at once or else be an outcast like Russia should it not run with tail between legs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS7v2kf5jto
And as a side bar, want to know why the animosity to Russia suddenly rose its ugly head. Watch this video. And who do you think is the spook in there who didn’t like the growing connection between the two powers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVTTvmCiDkg
To add some dimensionality to both Collective and Individual Needs,
and to their descendant Bills of Rights, and Whatever-Securities thereunder,
Shouldn’t we consider the essentiality of Including, ‘under-guard’, on the WorldWideWeb at least for Worldwide Eyes if not for ‘live-democratic-participation’,
the many kinds and extents of Facts, Factors, Priorities, Contexts, Relevancies, Clarificational-Questions and Contributions,
being ‘competitively’ left-out “not-enough-time-or-room”,
often deliberately suppressed, hidden, and excluded;
especially where “Democratic” Governance and Individual Holistic-Health, Wellbeing, and Human-Development Building, fall neglected.
—————————————————–
To get glimpses of such “omissions of fact or truth”, try skimming through
http://www.earth2.co ;
http://www.new-wwwww.net ;
http://www.lifefresh.co.uk ;
http://www.shammmo.net; and
http://www.me-myself-and-aye.net .
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Without the worldwide-genericly-accessible, and lowest-incomes-affordable, array of ordinary-people’s not-for-profit but serious “watchdog” websites,
the already inflatedly top-heavy, Militant, Political, Ethnic-Cleansing, Friendly-Fire, Popular-Marketplace-Hedonistic & Profiteering, ‘Freedom-Fighters’, Near-Runaway-Juggernauts of Non-MethodIII-rebel-minorities, and of both Mainstream-Majorities and “International-Communities” will blindly burgeon;
and we had better each and all start becoming of a “Silent Godly Order”, when asking or asked
“How shall one live a good life ?” replying:-
“By avoiding those People, Places, Publications, and Processes
that cause me to, or support me in, any kind of wrongdoing, sinning, or omission-of-right-doing”.
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Therefore, of course the WorldWideWeb has to be continued ,
and publicly-strengthened, for its own defence,
and as the ‘unarmed Earth-citizen’s needful voice’.
It needs to be constituted and guilelessly subsidised at UN level;
and only if truly ‘destructivist’ be
judicially-transparently edited, and not totally suppressed or censored,
not even for “the protection of The Public or ‘Whoever’.