How to Protect the Web We Want

(republished from The Open Standard)

We are at a critical point in the evolution of the Web. But as the Web turns 25, the picture of its future isn’t so rosy.

Despite its emergence as an integral part of modern life, the Web remains a fragile, contested resource. Far too often, we see it undermined by forces that wish to make it less free and less open. The fight over preserving net neutrality in the U.S.; the debate over governments undermining the Internet to further surveillance efforts; the curtailing of speech and access to the Internet by countries such as Turkey — these are all threats, not only to the Web, but to human rights.

Look no further than recent remarks from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation director, James Comey. Commenting on moves by Apple and Google to meet market needs by creating encryption in smart phones, Comey said,

“What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”

Beyond the law? Those are rich words in the wake of global unease over the level of spying and massive unwarranted dragnet surveillance.

The uncertainty can have a profoundly negative impact on people’s lives. Imagine a world in which the Web is behind a paywall with a la carte channels for access like cable TV. Imagine a world in which governments use the Web to erode to human rights like privacy, access to information and learning. Imagine a world in which all of people’s interactions — both online and on the ‘Internet of Things’ — are monitored and tracked, where people are subjugated for expressing their opinion, punished for who they connect with.

The fact is that we are already part way there, and that’s why we must fight back, reclaim lost ground, and reassert our rights as citizens in both our countries and the global community.

The stage is set: The world has a powerful, society-changing resource (the Web). The lifeblood of that resource (freedom, openness) is threatened by forces (government and other) that want to undermine it. This is the perfect storm that could erase the Web as we want it.

It’s time to broadly and creatively mobilize more individuals and organizations who are ready to protect the Web.

We need tech leaders – the developers, hackers and data crunchers – to build capacity to respond to challenges introduced by the speed and complexity of technical innovation.

We need more highly trained activists to innovate and quickly mobilize whenever and wherever the Internet is threatened.

And we need better story-tellers. We need more people like comedian John Oliver, whose comedic piece galvanized the pro-net neutrality movement, to enable the mainstream public to better understand the threats to the open Web and how it impacts them. And we need to enable people to protect the Web by learning how it works and giving them the tools to create their own advocacy efforts.

In many ways, there is already wind at our backs with effective activism and mobilization efforts:

• The 2012 defeat of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Europe was the result of the mobilization of activists and protests by dozens of tightly connected nonprofit organizations throughout Europe.
• In April 2014, Brazil passed the Marco Civil, a ‘Bill of Rights’ for the Internet, which protects net neutrality, expression, and data privacy for the country’s 100 million Internet users.
• The recent reversal of a proposed Internet Tax in Hungary due to massive online and street protests.

Perhaps the largest fight is happening as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission considers rules for net neutrality. To combat proposed rules that would have erased the level playing field of the web, a coalition of several nonprofit organizations, companies and other organizations that, together, drove in more than 4 million comments to the FCC in support of strong net neutrality, the most the commission has ever received.

We need to build off of this momentum by investing in the next generation of leaders and empowering the broader community of open web advocates.

For example, my organization, Mozilla, is partnering with the Ford Foundation to create the Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows program. This initiative will add to the growing and vibrant global ecosystem of leaders advocating for the free and open Web. In its first year, fellows will be fighting for the Web at organizations such as Amnesty International, the ACLU, Open Technology Institute, Free Press and Public Knowledge.

These Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows will be defending the Web we want: The Web that has become the greatest global resource in the history of the world; the Web that has helped bend the arc of history towards enlightenment and justice – from enabling communication around the Arab Spring to ensuring events in Ferguson, Missouri could be seen by the broader public; the Web that has fueled innovation and economy; the Web that has been shaped by billions of people already, and billions more in the most rural parts of the globe in the next few years.

Addressing a conference of engineers via video from Russia, Edward Snowden painted the image of powers seeking to destroy the Internet: with a powerful call to action:

‘They are setting fire to the Internet. You guys are the global firefighters.’

The stakes are high, the issues are real, and the opportunity is now. Let’s channel the power of all of us, standing together as a unified community, to put out the fires on the Internet, and fight for the Web we want.