 | |
Type of site | Campaign |
|---|---|
| URL | contractfortheweb |
| Commercial | No |
| Launched | 25 November 2019 |
Contract for the Web is an initiative by the World Wide Web Foundation in November 2019 to attempt to address issues of political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations, and other malign forces on the internet. [1]
The initiative is the product of work for more than a year by over 80 people drawn from government, businesses and the general public. [2] [3]
The Contract for the Web gives us a roadmap to build a better web
Tim Berners-Lee [2]
The plan outlines nine central principles, three each directed at governments, companies and individuals. [1] [3] It was launched 25 November 2019 by Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Foundation, [3] occurring before the start of the UN Internet Governance Forum meeting in Berlin. [4]
Endorsing governments, companies and individuals make commitments to protecting the web from abuse and ensuring it benefits humanity. [1] The commitment is understood to be non-binding. [5]
Contract for the web indicates principles 1 to 3 are for governments, 4 to 6 are for companies, and 7 to 9 are for citizens: [6]
By launch the plan was backed by over 150 organisations including names such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook. [2] Despite backing the plan, Facebook appeared to be ignoring Berners-Lee's request to Mark Zuckerberg to cease targeted political adverts for the 2019 United Kingdom general election. [3] Yasmin Alibhai-Brown gave the opinion in the United Kingdom's 'i news': "It’s just good PR and a fun game for the megalomaniacs who will carry on doing their worst". [7]
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on 12 March 1989, then implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in mid-November.
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is the world's dominant software platform. It is an information space where documents and other web resources can be accessed through the Internet using a web browser. The Web has changed people's lives immeasurably. It is the primary tool billions of people worldwide use to interact on the Internet. It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1991.
A web browser is application software for accessing the World Wide Web or a local website. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the web browser retrieves the necessary content from a web server and then displays the page on the user's device.
WorldWideWeb is the first web browser and web page editor. It was discontinued in 1994. At the time it was written, it was the sole web browser in existence, as well as the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.
Robert Cailliau is a Belgian informatics engineer, computer scientist and author who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. Together with Dr. James Gillies, Cailliau wrote How the Web Was Born, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.
The Line Mode Browser is the second web browser ever created. The browser was the first demonstrated to be portable to several different operating systems. Operated from a simple command-line interface, it could be widely used on many computers and computer terminals throughout the Internet. The browser was developed starting in 1990, and then supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an example and test application for the libwww library.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a British journalist and author, who describes herself as "a leftie liberal, anti-racist, feminist, Muslim...person". A regular columnist for the i newspaper and the Evening Standard, she is a well-known commentator on immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism issues.
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The World Wide Web is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly farther than that of the World Wide Web.
The Web Science Trust (WST) is a UK Charitable Trust with the aim of supporting the global development of Web science. It was originally started in 2006 as a joint effort between MIT and University of Southampton to formalise the social and technical aspects of the World Wide Web. The Trust coordinates a set of international "WSTNet Laboratories" that include academic research groups in the emerging area of Web science.
Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He is Chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Tim Berners-Lee. He is also a Visiting Professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Shadbolt is an interdisciplinary researcher, policy expert and commentator. His research focuses on understanding how intelligent behaviour is embodied and emerges in humans, machines and, most recently, on the Web, and has made contributions to the fields of Psychology, Cognitive science, Computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computer science and the emerging field of Web science.
The Online Centres Network is a UK-based network which helps communities tackle social and digital exclusion.
The World Wide Web Foundation, also known as the Web Foundation, is a US-based international non-profit organisation advocating for a free and open web for everyone. It was co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Rosemary Leith. Announced in September 2008 in Washington, D.C., the Web Foundation launched operations in November 2009 at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
Phorm, formerly known as 121Media, was a digital technology company known for its contextual advertising software. Phorm was incorporated in Delaware, United States, but relocated to Singapore as Phorm Corporation (Singapore) Ltd in 2012. Founded in 2002, the company originally distributed programs that were considered spyware, from which they made millions of dollars in revenue. It stopped distributing those programs after complaints from groups in the United States and Canada, and announced it was talking with several United Kingdom Internet service providers (ISPs) to deliver targeted advertising based on the websites that users visited. Phorm partnered with ISPs Oi, Telefonica in Brazil, Romtelecom in Romania, and TTNet in Turkey. In June 2012, Phorm made an unsuccessful attempt to raise £20 million for a 20% stake in its Chinese subsidiary.
The Virtual Revolution was a British television documentary series and interactive web experience presented by Aleks Krotoski, which began airing on BBC Two on 30 January 2010. A co-production between the BBC and the Open University, the series looks at the impact the World Wide Web has had since its inception 20 years ago. The series took a different approach to BBC documentary making by encouraging an open and collaborative production.
ENQUIRE was a software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web. It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways.
Professor Daniel J. Weitzner is the director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative and principal research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab CSAIL. He teaches Internet public policy in MIT's Computer Science Department. His research includes development of accountable systems architectures to enable the Web to be more responsive to policy requirements.
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably. URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages (http) but are also used for file transfer (ftp), email (mailto), database access (JDBC), and many other applications.
The Women's Technology Empowerment Centre (W.TEC) is a non-profit organization that provides technology education for women and girls in Nigeria. W.TEC offers services and programs including mentoring, training, technology camps, awareness campaigns, collaborative projects, and research and publication in order to empower women.
Solid is a web decentralization project led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, developed collaboratively at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project "aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy" by developing a platform for linked-data applications that are completely decentralized and fully under users' control rather than controlled by other entities. The ultimate goal of Solid is to allow users to have full control of their own data, including access control and storage location. To that end, Tim Berners-Lee formed a company called Inrupt to help build a commercial ecosystem to fuel Solid.
This article incorporates text available under the CC BY 4.0 license.