Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched a new website called contractfortheweb.org intended to lay out the behaviour/responsibilities of international internet giants, such as Google and Facebook, national governments and individual web citizens.
The document is 32 page long and calls itself as “a global plan of action to make our online world safe and empowering for everyone”. It lists nine principles for the Web (three aimed at governments, three for companies and three for individuals) and can be downloaded here as a pdf
Why add these social rules 30 years after the technical rules were released? The paper claims that whilst the Web “has changed the world for good and improved the lives of billions… (it) comes with too many unacceptable costs”.
The Contract is supported by more than 150 organisations, including GitHub, Reddit and DuckDuckGo and perhaps surprisingly, Facebook and Google who were recently cited by Professor Berners-Lee as examples of companies that should be broken up.