Tim Berners-Lee outlines nine principles to ‘fix’ the web

Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, has published a new set of guidelines to help keep the internet neutral and use it for good.

These guidelines are called the Contract for the Web, and there are nine core principles and 72 clauses to help “make sure our online world is safe, empowering and genuinely for everyone,” according to the website.

Berners-Lee began working on the contract in 2018, and throughout the year, his team gathered information from more than 600 people, including policy experts. This also includes representatives from top tech companies and governments, including, Microsoft, Germany, France, Wikimedia, Google and more

The contract is a mandate for what we want the internet to be in the future. To help make this a reality, the team is pushing to gather more partners. So far, it has support from a considerable number of companies such as Reddit, Facebook, DuckDuckGo and Twitter.

The contract’s FAQ page states a few ultimate goals for the web. The main goal is to create turn the online space into a place “where everyone around the world can “learn, communicate and collaborate, free from fear of abuse, privacy infringement, misinformation and suppression.”

The nine principles

1. Ensure everyone can connect to the internet
2. Keep all of the internet available, all of the time
3. Respect and protect people’s fundamental online privacy rights
4. Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
5. Respect and protect people’s privacy and personal data to build online trust
6. Develop technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst
7. Be creators and collaborators on the Web
8. Build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity
9. Fight for the Web

You can dive deeper into these principles on the contract’s website.

Source: Contract for the Web