On Monday, November 5, Tim Berners-Lee unveiled a document called “The Case for the Web” which outlines principles to protect and enhance the web’s future, as well as craft a collective contract for May 2019.
He revealed these plans for a contract at the Web Summit in Lisbon, together with his organization, the Web Foundation.
Signers to join the contract thus far include Facebook, Google, the French Government, Sir Richard Branson, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and more than fifty other organizations and key individuals. Amazon has reportedly not yet joined.
The contract is expected to be finalized in May 2019, the year when the web celebrates its 30th birthday, and when half of the world’s population is expected to be online.
When asked which particular groups he’s targeting to join, Berners-Lee pronounced[1], “Everybody, everybody.” The hope is that any and all companies, individuals, and governments will participate in crafting this contract. You can show your support here[2], and also participate on Twitter with #ForTheWeb.
Why do we need a case for the web?
The document begins by chronicling a bit of web history: how we’ve grown from just one website in 1990 to nearly two billion websites[3] at the end of 2018 — or one website for every four people in the world.
Much of that explosive growth has brought life-saving change: uncovering corruption, overthrowing dictators, providing emergency relief from natural disasters, sourcing truth, giving countless people access to education, advancing innovation, creating millions of jobs.
But much of that growth has also carried disastrous consequences: election interference, cyber bullying, misinformation, discrimination, spread of hate speech and terrorism, data breaches and privacy scandals.
For better and for worse, the web has “changed