A Contract For The Web

December 18, 2019 6:23 PM

With concerns over the behavior of Internet giants like Facebook and Google growing in the public eye, there has been a growing question as to what can be done to fight back. In an editorial for the New York Times, Sir Tim Berners-Lee puts forth his proposal - the Contract For The Web, which proposes a set of obligations for governments, corporations, and users to improve the health of the Internet.

The Contract is broken into nine "principles", three each for governments, corporations, and users. For governments, we have:

*Ensure everyone can connect to the internet
*Keep all off the internet available, all of the time
*Respect and protect people's fundamental online privacy and data rights

For companies:

*Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
*Respect and protect people's privacy and personal data to build online trust
*Develop technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst

And for users (whom Berners-Lee calls "citizens"):
*Be creators and collaborators on the Web
*Build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity
*Fight For The Web

posted by NoxAeternum (28 comments total)

Okay, I wrote the OP to be evenhanded in describing the Contract. But my opinion is simple - the Contract is an incoherent mess that at best is confused about why we're having all these social problems with the internet in large part because it approaches the matter through a technological lens - and at worst seeks to argue for an ideological view of the Web that had been rejected for good reason.

Now, that's not to say that there aren't good points made in the Contract, like affordability, accessibility, and net neutrality - all of which need to be addressed to improve the health of the internet. But it's clear that the Contract pushes an idea that the problem is that we didn't build the right structure for the Web, and all we need is to create that "right" structure and everything will be fixed. Of particular note are Principle 6 ("Develop technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst") - which frames the problem with hate being a matter of applying the proper technology and not a social issue which needs to be addressed at that level; and Principle 7 ("Be creators and collaborators on the Web"), which pushes a long-rejected conception of the internet as being built around the "donation" of creative labor by "citizens" as a duty.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:34 PM on December 18, 2019 [13 favorites]

Seems earnest and pointless. Nothing will come of it...
posted by PhineasGage at 6:39 PM on December 18, 2019 [8 favorites]

THe irony that the proposal to fix what's wrong with the web is behind a paywall...
posted by robhuddles at 6:41 PM on December 18, 2019 [15 favorites]

Just in terms of this approach, it's at least a decade and a half too late.
The horse is out of the barn, the barn has burned to the ground and the horse is now an influencer on Instagram.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 6:52 PM on December 18, 2019 [17 favorites]

I'll follow that horse.
posted by asperity at 7:03 PM on December 18, 2019 [10 favorites]

God, it was such bullshit thought when the horse posted a Nazi salute to Twitter and then refused to apologize, saying it was "historical cosplay."

The contract sounds at best like aspirational fluff: something we might all agree to in theory but will never actually get because who enforces the contract in the first place, and who tends to hold the power in these relationships? If users decide that yes, we want to license all our material under Creative Commons licenses and advocate for an accessible web, that means exactly jack shit if the powers that be don't care.

I feel like at least some of these principles feel carried over from an age when web standards were the big issue in internet circles: why don't all these tools interoperate effectively? And in that case, grassroots action from the relatively elite audience that made up the early web did seem to have some kind of effect, but it was also lucky that greater interoperability also made it easier to conduct business and gave companies a relatively stable platform to build their shit on. The Contract for the Web, on the other hand, makes certain business goals more difficult: users with robust privacy protections are harder to sell as an audience to advertisers, for example. Which doesn't mean it isn't a laudable goal that we should be moving towards, and we're again very lucky to have governments who have pushed for regulations in the areas of accessibility and privacy recently. But companies won't sign on until they find a compelling reason to do so. I'm not sure this gives them that, or what it would take.
posted by chrominance at 7:27 PM on December 18, 2019 [4 favorites]

Under supporters I see.. many companies who have made their riches from acting in contrary to these principles. And no governments, which these companies generally kotow.
posted by meowzilla at 7:59 PM on December 18, 2019 [4 favorites]

Corporate Rule 3b: establish a board of company officers, say 10, who will be held personally criminally liable for any illegal content posted to the internet on their platform.

So like 30 incidents of trafficking child porn and all ten get life, then the next ten are up.

Maybe 5 years each for revenge porn?
posted by j_curiouser at 8:38 PM on December 18, 2019

I'm in IT consulting, and over and over, clients are looking for a technical solution to their problems: What stack should we migrate to? Can we rebuild this legacy mess? How do we do DevOps? I can help with some of that, but the most useful help (if my team and I can successfully land the message) is to communicate that it's primarily a cultural problem.

The same is true of the Internet. If the culture is fucked up, so too will be the Internet. It's not a problem amenable to a technological fix.
posted by Ickster at 9:19 PM on December 18, 2019 [10 favorites]

Corporate Rule 3b: establish a board of company officers, say 10, who will be held personally criminally liable for any illegal content posted to the internet on their platform.

How about we just pick people at random off major company boards to be held criminally liable?

No, I didn't mean to say "internet company."
posted by atoxyl at 9:21 PM on December 18, 2019 [3 favorites]

Corporate Rule 3b: establish a board of company officers, say 10, who will be held personally criminally liable for any illegal content posted to the internet on their platform.

Scenario: their business models untenable and their lobbying towards repeal rebuffed, these corporations sell everything on the cheap to the gov't. Which 10 gov't officers are personally liable for Internet crime? Can we elect them? Can we elect them and actually follow through on the requirements of the office such that it's a form of electoral ostracization?

Scenario: their business models untenable, these corporations downsize and evict humans from the Internet. Only bots and APIs remain, tended by carefully vetted and bonded developers themselves forbidden from directly using the network.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 9:26 PM on December 18, 2019

I say we go after these problems with the same three tools that have never failed us: Duct tape, WD-40, and bacon.
posted by Chitownfats at 9:35 PM on December 18, 2019 [5 favorites]

A Better Internet Is Waiting for Us - "We need to stop handing off responsibility for maintaining public space to corporations and algorithms — and give it back to human beings."

Peter Thiel at Center of Facebook's Internal Divisions on Politics - "Thiel has argued that Facebook should stick to its controversial decision, announced in September, to continue accepting them and to not fact-check those from politicians, the people said. However, some directors and executives are pushing for changes to the policy, including possibly banning political ads altogether, they said."[1,2]

UK to create regulator to police big tech companies - "The move reflects the findings of a review led by Jason Furman, chief economic adviser to former US president Barack Obama, which looked into the 'emergence of powerful new companies' in the tech sector and recommended a dedicated regulator."*

-Japan to keep tight leash on Big Tech in antitrust push
-A Framework for Regulating Competition on the Internet
-Apple, Amazon and Google form alliance for smart home devices

but if better tech/more competition and regulation aren't the answer, then ???

@elidourado broadens the scope:

First, it is obvious that the Internet has underperformed expectations if you will actually recall what the expectations were... In reality, Internet culture is not so lofty. For better and worse, it basically reflects humanity's virtues and foibles...

If we want rapid economic growth, we need investment in the physical world, especially in low-productivity-growth sectors that make up large portions of the economy. Foremost among these are health, housing, energy, and transportation.

For all the good that Silicon Valley does, it seems institutionally incapable of providing enough investment into those sectors. This isn't the fault of any one person. It's simply the logic of a gold rush in a mostly unregulated digital space.

Large VC firms are funded by LPs who are often institutions like college endowments or public sector union pension funds. These institutions want exposure to trendy tech stuff with no regulatory risk. So that is what many VC firms fund.

Digital tech has a huge advantage in that much of it is protected by the First Amendment, so it is significantly sheltered from regulation. No such luck in health, housing, energy, and transportation, so less investment in those areas.

I am a fan of the First Amendment and if anything I would like it to offer more protection, but it seems to me it functions as a kind of investment subsidy for SV by wiping out regulatory risk in lots of digital tech.

Perhaps regulatory risk in the physical world can't go to zero, but we need to solve real regulatory problems if we want physical world investment to compete on anything like a level playing field with digital stuff. Otherwise it's a distortionary gold rush to digital tech.

cf. "The key, as @patrickc[3,4] and other have recognized, is not to make businesses better at finding ways to make money off of physical technologies (they're already really good at that!). It's to create more physical technologies." viz. Assume a can opener (create tech hubs in America's lagging regions ;)

-What to do once you admit that decentralizing everything never seems to work[5,6]
-How we know when decentralization works in government
-Effective systems mix and marble centralized and decentralized elements
-A tao of (de)centralization (A tao of politics)
-The Decentralization Foundation
-Instead of Universal Basic Income, Try Universal Basic Stakeholding

Frances Moore Lappé changed how we eat. She wants to do the same for our democracy. - "Democracy stands for a set of three conditions that are necessary to bring forth the best in our nature and keep the worst in check. It means the continuous and wide dispersion of economic and political power; it means transparency; and it means cultivating a culture of mutual accountability. The reason that this system is creating such incredible misery is that our essential needs for power, meaning and connection are not fulfilled by it. The challenge is trying to embody those needs in our lives and work for them in terms of changing the system's rules and norms. It relates to the idea of finding your inner citizen and participating in changing system laws, not just policy laws."
posted by kliuless at 9:56 PM on December 18, 2019 [7 favorites]

Digital tech has a huge advantage in that much of it is protected by the First Amendment, so it is significantly sheltered from regulation.

The First Amendment has nothing to do with it - we granted the tech industry blanket indemnification, and then look surprised when all the usual problems with blanket indemnification took hold.

Also, the simple reality is that Barlow was wrong. The online world needed to be governed, but the people who shaped it in its earliest phases rejected the concept of governance - which again set the stage for problems that we are still struggling with.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:31 PM on December 18, 2019 [7 favorites]

Contracts are usually struck by parties who gain something. Unless the usual suspects make money or gain influence, why would they enter into a vague agreement to effectively "do no evil"? We saw how that went with Google, for instance, and now they are firing people for organizing and getting in the way of making money. Does Sir Tim live in a bubble?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:42 PM on December 18, 2019 [4 favorites]

With no sense of irony, Sir Tim Berners-Lee puts forth his proposal for a better Internet in an editorial on a website you can't view without creating an account.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:45 PM on December 18, 2019 [4 favorites]

"We need to stop handing off responsibility for maintaining public space to corporations and algorithms — and give it back to human beings."

This is the heart of the fallacy - that the corporations got the human beings to believe that Facebook, Google, etc. are 'public space', and that therefore it is the responsibility of the human beings to maintain them.

Rewrite : "We need to stop handing off space to corporations and algorithms — and give it back to human beings."
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:50 PM on December 18, 2019

This morning India cut off mobile broadband internet access in selected New Delhi neighbourhoods.
posted by Mrs Potato at 2:08 AM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

Does Sir Tim live in a bubble?

Hint: "Sir" Tim.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:53 AM on December 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

The real problems I see with the internet are:

1. A lot of people are dicks.
2. Capitalism (see #1).
posted by Foosnark at 5:13 AM on December 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

My first temptation is just to write "how many nuclear weapons does the group behind this proposal have?" and leave it at that. Because if the answer is "zero", their opinion is largely irrelevant, to a first-order approximation. The Internet is now a contested space between superpower states, and while for the moment the big corporations may believe that they call the shots, they do so only because whichever state they have the most exposure to hasn't decided to tell them exactly what they're going to do yet. They rule, you might say, at the pleasure of actual states, that control actual territory, with actual violence. Cyberspace doesn't exist, the cloud doesn't exist, it's all just shit running on other people's computers, which sit in actual space.

This is depressing, if you still believe in the 80s/90s vision of cyberspace as a space apart from the real world with its annoying rules and power structures, but I think at this point anyone who's still living in that world is smoking something really good. (Sir Tim has access, apparently, to some really high-grade shit. Presumably that's what the "Sir" gets you.)

Big corporations are effectively—willingly or not—instruments of state power and national policy. Facebook and Google are de facto US assets; Yandex is Russian; Baidu and Alibaba are Chinese. You can predict the actions these companies will take—that they'll be allowed to take, but also what they'll find ways of justifying to themselves are their own decisions—based on what is beneficial to the states that they exist symbiotically inside. Occasionally they may arrogantly insist that they are beyond petty national politics; this is the classic mistake of believing that your disinterest in politics protects you from a reciprocal interest by politics.

Sir Tim is a relic of a more civilized age, of an age of technological utopianism but also of multilateralism and transnationalism. That age is dead and buried. We are squarely in the middle of a new, multipolar Cold War, of great power competition and hybrid warfare. The Internet is not immune; in fact, it is a battlefield par excellence. Nation-states control the Internet because they control people and territory. They can and will switch it on and off, censor it as best they can, create isolated corners disconnected from the rest, and generally treat it just like actual territory, because it is actual territory.

There is no turning the clock back to the 1990s. There is no solution to making the Internet a space free of political concerns; the only way to improve the Internet is to improve the underlying politics that make it the way it is. Technological solutions can only nibble around the edges of the problem, and they can only do that insofar as political realities let them do that.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:34 AM on December 19, 2019 [10 favorites]

So like 30 incidents of trafficking child porn and all ten get life, then the next ten are up.

These would be temp staffing positions, creating a gig to prison pipeline. It's disruptive, back my kickstarter.
posted by otherchaz at 7:58 AM on December 19, 2019 [3 favorites]

I think Sir Tim is a fan of Silicon Valley. This smells a lot like Gavin Belson's Tethics
posted by SonInLawOfSam at 9:02 AM on December 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

Capitalim is godly and Hate is a good business model it seems.
Profits from far-right groups and individuals posting unacceptable content on the social media giant about Muslims may be the reason why it’s not taking action to remove it.
posted by adamvasco at 9:09 AM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

While it's a mistake to imagine that technological solutions can by themselves solve social problems, it's equally a mistake to assume that technology and technological structures are simply value-neutral carriers of culture that will sort themselves out once the culture has been changed.

In particular, the structures of current social networks intrinsically promote the organization of attention and status into heavily concentrated hierarchies-- they have a structural tendency towards inequality, and the extension of this is that beliefs/worldviews/ideologies sharing this tendency will be favored over those that do not.

Like, I think we're now appropriately skeptical of self-styled "progressive" billionaires, because the belief that one person deserves to have many orders of magnitude more wealth than another seems incompatible with any kind of meaningful belief in equality. But the same can be said of attention and status: the idea that one person deserves to have their every shower thought seen by 100 million followers while other people struggle to be heard at all is very difficult to reconcile with a genuine commitment to equality, and yet that is exactly the distribution of attention that current social networks structurally promote.

So yes, changing the culture is important, and perhaps even the most important thing. But technological change will be needed too, and every attempt to consider alternative technological arrangements shouldn't be reflexively dismissed as trying to solve social problems with technology.

(This particular 'contract' though is a bunch of vague corporate-speak)
posted by Pyry at 9:30 AM on December 19, 2019 [3 favorites]

On Census, Facebook And Instagram To Ban Disinformation And False Ads (Hansi Lo Wang for NPR, December 19, 2019)

Facebook is changing user policies for its social media platforms to explicitly ban disinformation about and ads trying to discourage participation in the 2020 census, the company announced on its website Thursday.
...
Last week, Google, which owns YouTube, announced a new ban on YouTube videos and user comments that "aiming to mislead participants about the time, means or eligibility requirements for participating in a census." In November, Google, which is also a financial sponsor of NPR, released an updated ad policy citing information about census participation that "contradicts official government records" as an example of misleading content not allowed on the company's platforms.

See, these mega-powers are looking to play well! Why don't you trust them?
posted by filthy light thief at 10:18 AM on December 19, 2019

Brought to you by the same people that created the Semantic Web.
posted by sammyo at 10:54 AM on December 19, 2019

> Contracts are usually struck by parties who gain something. Unless the usual suspects make money or gain influence, why would they enter into a vague agreement to effectively "do no evil"? We saw how that went with Google, for instance, and now they are firing people for organizing and getting in the way of making money.

Former Google Exec Says He Was Forced Out for Opposing Company's Pivot to Evil
posted by homunculus at 4:30 AM on January 15, 2020 [2 favorites]