It’s our job to fix ailing www

If by the age of 30 your child had seen times of great ideas and amazing potential, and now anticipated decline for the rest of their life, what would you do? Would you try to restore their capability and trust so they can leverage the potential to achieve even greater things later in life, or just watch and do nothing?

As the World Wide Web turns 30 in 2019, it faces exactly this situation. Once a deliberating, empowering and free global-scale informationsharing platform, it is now under threat by governments that censor and direct which information we see on the basis of nationalist motifs, companies that exploit our personal data and algorithmically manipulate our information consumption based purely on commercial drivers, and individuals who contribute to the spread of misinformation or harmful content to support political agendas that divide.

Only a few people remember the original ethos of the World Wide Web, of a decentralised system for everyone to build, shape and foster. This was inherent, on both the technical and social level, in the invention by Sir Tim Berners-Lee when at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in the 1980s.

The technical components are open standards for sharing and accessing information that are easy to understand, learn and use. The social mandate is that these shall be free forever and it’s the people who bring the web to its full potential, through a common spirit of building innovative applications and connecting at global scale in ways good for humanity.

The recent data breach at Facebook involving Cambridge Analytica, as well as the public announcement of Google to release a censored search engine for the Chinese market, show the web of open and participatory principles no longer exists. We are already in the dystopian scenario that the web is broken and can be weaponised against us. It is our responsibility to fix it and reestablish the values that helped build it.

On the technical level, this involves work on systems that decouple the data from the application and leave it with the individual. What sounds like science fiction is already possible using the open standards of the web. Berners-Lee and his team have developed SOLID, a freely available software to start moving from centralised to decentralised web applications, from giving personal data to monopolies to taking back control of it. Web developers now have to build the applications end-users can use with SOLID that have the same user experience as social media applications currently in use.

On the social level, we need broad agreement that personal data exploitation, as well as censorship, are unacceptable practices. Furthermore, we need developers to agree on ethical and moral guidelines that constrain what they are willing to do. Whistleblowers who inform about any global-scale corporate or governmental wrongdoing are key, but it would be even better if developers unite and don’t do certain kinds of data analysis, even though it is technically possible and economically promising.

Finally, we need businesses to radically change their mind about monetisation online, away from advertisement and personalisation that only works if masses of people give up on privacy. This will be challenging for short-term profit but good for humanity in the long run, which will then also bring new business opportunities and should consequently motivate governments – including New Zealand’s – to invest in research and development in this area.

As Berners-Lee said in his recent Turing Lecture: ‘‘If you spend 98 per cent of your time on the Web, you may have to spend 2 per cent of your life defending it.’’

Dr Markus Luczak-Roesch is in the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington.