| World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee unveiled the Contract for the Web yesterday, a set of guiding principles meant to make the internet a good, equitable, prosperous, noninvasive space. It's an excellent goal, and it's encouraging to see major names already on board: Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Microsoft, among others. At the same time, some of those names are also what make me wary. There's no mechanism right now to enforce the contract's goals, and some of those companies — *ahem* Facebook — are clearly the very companies that this contract is designed to protect us and the web against. So what's the point of having them agree to this? It's a fine idea, and it sounds like some semblance of enforcement (or at least, shaming of companies that do a bad job), could come in the future. But I don't know that this is the thing that will "fix" the web, as Berners-Lee believes it can. - Jake P.S. Dieter's out this week, so a few guests will be popping in to keep things running during the ~ season of deals ~ + Tim Berners-Lee launches Google & Facebook-backed plan to fix the web The contract’s launch comes as tech companies such as Facebook and Google have faced mounting pressure around both the amount of user data they collect and the ways in which they collect it. The Contract for the Web includes principles designed to prevent this, including a requirement for companies to respect people’s privacy and personal data. If companies do not show that they are working to support these aims, they risk being removed from the list of the project’s endorsers. |
