WWW coming of age: New debates in changed landscape

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Editor's Note: David Lee is a consultant and author based in Beijing who works on cross-cutting themes of energy, health, international politics and international development. The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Quietly, the World Wide Web (WWW) celebrated its 30th birthday. Exactly three decades ago on March 12, 1989, British computer scientist Berners-Lee, then working at CERN, wrote a proposal about an architecture to easily store and access information across computers in an organized way.

He would later proceed to write the world's first web server and browser client, hence the humble beginning of the WWW. Later, this crude creation would evolve into a technological revolution that has fundamentally transformed the way for information sharing, and hence the way of life on our planet.

An explanatory note here: even though the two terms of WWW and Internet are oftentimes used interchangeably, they actually mean very different but related things. The Internet is a giant network of computers – only computers are communicating in a way unfathomable by the general laymen.

The WWW provides a universally accepted way of accessing the Internet, so that we ordinary people can easily talk to the computers and access information on the Internet without being computer gurus.

The world today offers a markedly changed landscape from that of 1989. Today's debates about the WWW have also changed dramatically to reflect the ethos of current times.

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee delivers a speech during an event marking 30 years of World Wide Web at the CERN in Meyrin, Switzerland, March 12, 2019. /VCG Photo

First of all, at the nascent stage of the WWW, the most important thing was just to make it happen – to really make the Internet a useful tool for everyone. Today, half of the world's population is already online (data as of end of 2018), the debates have been shifted to management and governance of a tool that's been proven extremely powerful.

Apparently, WWW creator Berners-Lee has not been particularly satisfied about his own creation. To commemorate the coming of age of the WWW, Berners-Lee penned a cri-de-coeur letter to warn against its dangerous excesses, not least spreading falsehood and hatred.

As a fatherly figure of the WWW, Berners-Lee has over the years become the world's leading liberal advocate for the “Contract for the Web”. Under the contract, governments are called upon to make sure Internet availability and protect people's privacy.

Companies are urged to make the Internet affordable and, again, respect privacy. Citizens also share obligations under the Contract – to conduct “civil discourse,” among others.

Of course, as promoted by Berners-Lee and many like-minded visionaries, these are all very important management and governance themes. Humankind as a community that shares a common destiny must have the vision and readiness to manage and govern a crucially important tool that has tremendous power to both make and destroy.

Then comes the practical question of how to manage and govern. Liberal idealists have promoted “net neutrality,” a political philosophical castle built on principles of absolutism for unhindered, indiscriminate access to whatever information there is online.

An attendee works on a laptop computer during the 2019 CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference in Houston, Texas, U.S., March 11, 2019. /VCG Photo

For too long, political philosophy has meddled with practical management and governance matters, or at least it was the situation in the West. Only recently following the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote have outcries of fake news and opinion manipulation led to calls for stronger online regulation.

Albeit this apparent change of mindset in the West, online regulation practices remain to be held political hostage in the West, particularly when it has to do with how non-Western countries independently manage and govern the cyberspace within their own jurisdictions.

In the case of China, government control on information flown through and within the Chinese Internet has long been a target of vehement bombardment in the West.

Ironically, even when the fight against fake news and opinion manipulation proves to be an extremely difficult battle, the morally confident West refuses to understand a bit more about management and governance technicalities in China.

Chinese people tend to think the age of 30 marks the important coming of age of a person. If the coming of age of the WWW bears more symbolic meaning than practical significance, the current debates about cyberspace management and governance are substantial.

Just as liberal-idealist “Contract for the Web” represents a noble cause for the future, practical cyberspace management and governance measures, neutral of political and ideological persuasion, pave the way towards defeating falsehood and hatred-inciting, the real enemies of humankind in the digital age.

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