World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee
released an ambitious rule book for online
governance — a bill of rights and obligations
for the internet — designed to counteract the
growing prevalence of such anti-democratic
poisons as misinformation, mass surveillance
and censorship.
The product of a year’s work by the World
Wide Web Foundation where Berners-Lee is a
founding director, the “Contract for the Web”
seeks commitments from governments and
industry to make and keep knowledge freely
available — a digital policy agenda true to the
design vision of the 30-year-old web.
The contract is non-binding, however. And
funders and partners in the endeavor include
Google and Facebook, whose data-collectingImage: Catrina Genovese