Tim Berners-Lee: A Magna Carta for the web

TED is 30.

The world wide web is celebrating this month

its 25th anniversary.

So I've got a question for you.

Let's talk about the journey, mainly about the future.

Let's talk about the state.

Let's talk about what sort of a web we want.

So 25 years ago, then, I was working at CERN.

I got permission in the end after about a year

to basically do it as a side project.

I wrote the code.

I was I suppose the first user.

There was a lot of concern

that people didn't want to pick it up

because it would be too complicated.

A lot of persuasion, a lot of wonderful

collaboration with other people,

and bit by bit, it worked.

It took off. It was pretty cool.

And in fact, a few years later in 2000,

five percent of the world population

were using the world wide web.

In 2007, seven years later, 17 percent.

In 2008, we formed the World Wide Web Foundation

partly to look at that

and worry about that figure.

And now here we are in 2014,

and 40 percent of the world

are using the world wide web, and counting.

Obviously it's increasing.

I want you to think about both sides of that.

Okay, obviously to anybody here at TED,

the first question you ask is, what can we do

to get the other 60 percent on board

as quickly as possible?

Lots of important things. Obviously it's going to be around mobile.

But also, I want you to think about the 40 percent,

because if you're sitting there yourself

sort of with a web-enabled life,

you don't remember things anymore,

you just look them up,

then you may feel that it's been a success

and we can all sit back.

But in fact, yeah, it's been a success,

there's lots of things, Khan Academy

for crying out loud, there's Wikipedia,

there's a huge number of free e-books

that you can read online,

lots of wonderful things for education,

things in many areas.

Online commerce has in some cases

completely turned upside down the way commerce works altogether,

made types of commerce available

which weren't available at all before.

Commerce has been almost universally affected.

Government, not universally affected,

but very affected, and on a good day,

lots of open data, lots of e-government,

so lots of things which are visible

happening on the web.

Also, lots of things which are less visible.

The healthcare, late at night when they're worried

about what sort of cancer

somebody they care about might have,

when they just talk across the Internet to somebody

who they care about very much in another country.

Those sorts of things are not, they're not out there,

and in fact they've acquired a certain amount of privacy.

So we cannot assume that part of the web,

part of the deal with the web,

is when I use the web,

it's just a transparent, neutral medium.

I can talk to you over it without worrying

about what we in fact now know is happening,

without worrying about the fact

that not only will surveillance be happening

but it'll be done by people who may abuse the data.

So in fact, something we realized,

we can't just use the web,

we have to worry about

what the underlying infrastructure of the whole thing,

is it in fact of a quality that we need?

We revel in the fact that we have this wonderful free speech.

We can tweet, and oh, lots and lots of people

can see our tweets, except when they can't,

except when actually Twitter is blocked from their country,

or in some way the way we try to express ourselves

has put some information about the state of ourselves,

the state of the country we live in,

which isn't available to anybody else.

So we must protest and make sure

that censorship is cut down,

that the web is opened up

where there is censorship.

We love the fact that the web is open.

It allows us to talk. Anybody can talk to anybody.

It doesn't matter who we are.

And then we join these big

social networking companies

which are in fact effectively built as silos,

so that it's much easier to talk to somebody

in the same social network

than it is to talk to somebody in a different one,

so in fact we're sometimes limiting ourselves.

And we also have, if you've read the book about the filter bubble,

the filter bubble phenomenon is that

we love to use machines

which help us find stuff we like.

So we love it when we're bathed in

what things we like to click on,

and so the machine automatically feeds us

the stuff that we like and we end up

with this rose-colored spectacles view of the world

called a filter bubble.

So here are some of the things which maybe

threaten the social web we have.

What sort of web do you want?

I want one which is not fragmented into lots of pieces,

as some countries have been suggesting

they should do in reaction to recent surveillance.

I want a web which has got, for example,

is a really good basis for democracy.

I want a web where I can use healthcare

with privacy and where there's a lot

of health data, clinical data is available

to scientists to do research.

I want a web where the other 60 percent

get on board as fast as possible.

I want a web which is such a powerful basis for innovation

that when something nasty happens,

some disaster strikes, that we can respond

by building stuff to respond to it very quickly.

So this is just some of the things that I want,

from a big list, obviously it's longer.

You have your list.

I want us to use this 25th anniversary

to think about what sort of a web we want.

You can go to webat25.org

and find some links.

There are lots of sites where people

have started to put together a Magna Carta,

a bill of rights for the web.

How about we do that?

How about we decide, these are, in a way,

becoming fundamental rights, the right to communicate with whom I want.

What would be on your list for that Magna Carta?

Let's crowdsource a Magna Carta

for the web.

Let's do that this year.

Let's use the energy from the 25th anniversary

to crowdsource a Magna Carta

to the web. (Applause)

Thank you. And do me a favor, will you?

Fight for it for me. Okay? Thanks.

(Applause)