Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality

In just 20 years, the world has come to take the instant connections of the worldwide web for granted. The web’s creator – Tim Berners-Lee – lists emerging threats to the vast store of linked data in an essay for Scientific American, including fragmentation, exclusivity by social networking sites like Facebook, slowing traffic to non-customers and monitoring individual online habits. The essay is part of the magazine’s series celebrating the worldwide web’s 20th anniversary. Principles that include universality, decentralized control, open standards, separation between the Web and the internet, net neutrality, and privacy expectations encourage scientific discoveries, government accountability and countless other innovations. “The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation,” Berners-Lee argues. “The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.” – YaleGlobal