This article was taken from the March 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Sometime later in 2015, the Global Commission on Internet Governance (GCIG) is due to publish a series of research papers as part of its report on the future of internet governance. Topics will include internet fragmentation, the global economics of net neutrality, human rights online and emergent cybersecurity challenges. There is a growing demand for a sensible debate in this very complicated, but increasingly important, area.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, has called for a Magna Carta for the internet as part of his Web We Want campaign. Last spring marked 25 years since Berners-Lee developed the web using the same principles on which the internet itself was founded, namely that it was decentralised in architecture, that its standards and protocols were open and free, and that their evolution was organised democratically by those most involved in their development. These principles have led to the web we know and love. But they are now under threat from governments and corporations as the web becomes even more significant in our lives.
We will hear a lot more about personal data, privacy, security and trust. The open-data movement has brought an increased awareness of the power of data for innovation, but not all data can be made open,and there are major ethical and moral issues facing society in terms of how we should handle the massive amount of personal data that we are all generating. Health data is one obvious example -- but we are increasingly hearing about unauthorised experiments being run by social-network companies on the data they hold about users. Such experiments must be subject to accepted ethical practices, but how do we go about establishing the necessary regulations and standards across the world?
What are our rights in terms of internet access? And who has what rights to do what with our data? As Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA have proved, governments are preoccupied with what citizens are getting up to on the internet, and with the fact that they have little control over either us or the global network that has self-evolved to become the dominant way in which those of us who are connected access information globally. A separate European internet has already been proposed amid questions about US dominance in this space. China makes much of freedom of access for its citizens, while monitoring everything they do.
Emergency legislation is being enacted without consultation to ensure appropriate checks and balances are put in place, and governments are failing to agree on basic issues such as net neutrality. Berners-Lee's proposed Magna Carta will be one way of trying to ensure that the internet remains, as it was originally intended, a force for good in humanity.
We have begun the journey. In June 2014, the United Nations published a report entitled "The right to privacy in the digital age". It stated "there is a clear and pressing need for vigilance in ensuring the compliance of any surveillance policy or practice with international human-rights law, including the right to privacy, through the development of effective safeguards against abuses".
We can only take the Magna Carta analogy so far. If governments are King John, that would make corporations the barons. But who will represent the rest of us, the users? That's something we all need to ask as 2015 gets underway.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
