In Long Live the Web, Berners-Lee discusses the development of the Web, how humans interact with it, and what kind of rights we have (and should have) related to it. Berners-Lee argues that the Web is “more critical to free speech than any other medium” (pg. 82), which I agree with. The Web is incredibly important to free speech because of its widespread – and at times accessible – nature. In terms of accessibility, I believe that designers and developers should do more to think about how they can make their sites even more accessible. (Here is a handy Medium blogpost by Pablo Stanley including some accessibility design tips.)
I found it interesting that Berners-Lee argues for decentralization, which makes a lot of sense (and which is why blockchain technology is so intriguing). However, he also argues for a single, universal information space, which again makes sense, but in conjunction with decentralization, sounds counterintuitive. How might we manage the single, universal information space effectively? Who manages it? How do we manage them?
There are obvious challenges in maintaining this one-stop shop. We have to worry about monopolies, privacy invasion, data leaks, etc. However, I believe that users of the internet should hold themselves responsible for educating themselves in terms of how companies might take advantage of users’ ignorance in order to make money because — let’s face it — businesses are always going to look for ways to monetize. For example, businesses will take advantage of a user’s browsing history in order to launch targeted advertising. During my research at Intent, I interviewed users about their perception of online advertising and found some interesting results. Some users understood how cookies work, and did not mind targeted advertising, and sometimes even found it useful. Other users clearly did not understand how the internet works and found retargeting creepy, intrusive, and reminded them of “big brother”.
Berners-Lee also discusses the need for government legislation to protect net neutrality, yet how the Web “thrive[s] on lack of regulation”, but that “some basic values have to be legally preserved” (pg. 84). I agree with this, but I think it is hard to determine where one draws the line. I am very intrigued by how policy and law making will attempt to catch up with the lightning-speed development of the Web. Another case study which proves that regulation lags behind is brought up by Burrington in her article “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud“, where she discusses the Microsoft legal battle:
“At the heart of the case is whether the U.S. government has jurisdiction to request data located in a data center in Ireland if that data belongs to an American Microsoft user. The government argues that where Microsoft stores the data is immaterial—they’re an American company and since Microsoft can access data stored anywhere while physically in the U.S., it doesn’t matter where that data’s stored. Microsoft challenged the warrant on the grounds that a search doesn’t happen at the point of accessing the data (in this case, in the U.S.) but where the data is stored. As of September 2015, the challenge to the warrant was still in dispute.”
This case proves that the system is not equipped to handle the battles of the Web. Another recent example of this is the implementation of GDPR (The EU General Data Protection Regulation), which determines how companies may collect data, what they can do with it, among other requirements (companies now have to be more upfront about how they use user data and give users easy access to opting out and deleting their user profiles). This affected not only EU based companies, but also US based companies that function in or are embedded on sites that are hosted in the EU (I am all too familiar with this because we had an entire team dedicated to achieving GDPR compliance at my company and everyone had to read up on it). When the time comes, it will be interesting to see how the US government tackles an initiative similar to GDPR…