Happy 30th Birthday, W3C

This week, I was honored to take part in a 30th anniversary celebration of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international standards body for the web. The W3C’s birthday is coming up on October 1, and I was part of a group that gathered in California – as well as many more joining online – for a W3C@30 event on September 24th, during the annual technical plenary week of meetings.

The other speakers and I examined the profound effects the W3C has had on the way the web has evolved from a niche application to something deeply integrated into our everyday lives. My own talk focuses in particular on human rights and internet standards, with a view on what we’ve learned over the past three decades and the importance of our continued work.

We’ve had the basic technology of the web for 35 years, and since 1994, the international community has been working through the W3C to create the standards and interoperability necessary for it to thrive. In that time, we’ve seen the advantages of a global communications network for human rights, including our ability to read, see and hear voices that had been largely excluded from the public conversation before the digital era. We’ve seen activists and others use the web to bring abuses and atrocities to the world’s attention, and we’ve experienced the power of collaboration across national and cultural lines for everything from academic progress to artistic creation.

We’ve also seen the risks, from the invasion of privacy to online harassment, censorship and the power of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda to sway minds. As the W3C reaches a new milestone, we need to realize that we as a global community need intentional work to mitigate the internet’s real dangers to the rights — and sometimes the lives — of billions of people.

The W3C’s history as a multistakeholder organization shows us a promising way forward. When everyone from tech companies to national governments to academics and civil society organizations take part, the array of perspectives in the room helps us take a broader view of the questions about rights that are embedded in the decisions we make about how technologies should work.

For more, watch my presentation below as well as other talks at W3C@30. 

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Full Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LNUg5vDWDY

Full Text:

Good evening, I’m Nick Doty, senior technologist at the Center For Democracy and Technology. And it’s such a pleasure to be here to celebrate the 30th anniversary of W3C.

For those who aren’t familiar, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization fighting to advance civil rights and civil liberties online. We shape technology policy, governance, and design with a focus on equity and democratic values.

CDT was an early organizational member of the World Wide Web Consortium in the 1990s and my predecessors at CDT have been participating in W3C standardization since 1995. 

I’m honored to be able to continue that long-time civil society participation and to be here to speak about the work we are all engaged in to support human rights in web standards.

Over those past 30 years, the Web has been an incredible boon for humanity and for human rights.

There may not be a singular source of human rights, but the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – adopted in 1948 – should be especially meaningful to this community because of its consensus development by countries around the world. 

Looking through that important text, I see the impact of the Web in supporting:

freedom of expression, 

freedom of assembly and association, 

freedom from discrimination, 

access to public services, 

the right to education, 

the right to work, 

and the right to participate in cultural life.

We use the Web now for political organizing, news reporting, social connection, healthcare, interacting with our governments, employers, and schools. It is where we work and learn, where we speak up and where we listen.

And W3C has played an important role in making those rights and freedoms a reality through its collaboration on web standards and interoperability.

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recognized that importance, and the role of technical standards in particular, in a report to the Human Rights Council. And that report cites heavily the work of W3C as an example of considering human rights impacts of technical standard setting.

Human rights and technical standard-setting processes for new and emerging digital technologies

Anniversaries are a fine time to reflect on those achievements and their importance to a growing number of people around the world.

But as the Web has become an essential part of public and community life, we also must realize the very significant threats to human rights online.

surveillance and threats to privacy (where I have spent much of my career, and where many of you have seen me discussing issues in your working groups)

discrimination, harassment and abuse

censorship and threats to freedom of expression and association

threats to security, safety, dignity or sustainability

In recognizing those threats, we acknowledge a weighty and urgent responsibility to protect users and society in our standards work.

Thirty years ago it might have been possible to unplug and leave the Web behind. Now, for people all around the world, including people living under dangerous and oppressive regimes, that’s simply not an option. We need to think about standards as if lives depend on them: because they do.

I remain an optimist about the potential for technology, especially the Web, to strengthen support for human rights, that tomorrow can be better than today.

But to live up to that promise, our community will need to recommit itself to the essential work of supporting human rights in the design of Web technology.

Human rights must not be an afterthought to the work that we’re doing. In today’s world there cannot be human rights offline if they aren’t protected online. And they can’t be protected online without the careful work of the people here today, among others.

I’m proud of the work that’s already ongoing, including

• Ethical Web Principles
• Privacy Principles, which I hope will be among our first W3C community Statements
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and other work of the Web Accessibility Initiative
• Internationalization work that you heard about earlier this evening
• from colleagues at IETF/IRTF, a published set of Guidelines for Human Rights Protocol and Architecture Considerations
• and I’m especially proud of W3C’s Horizontal Review process, and the consideration of those cross-cutting concerns across all of the Web standards work that we do

But there’s more to be done. As an open multistakeholder standard-setting body, W3C has a precious opportunity to include, collaborate on, address and pro-actively support human rights in Web standards and Web technology. This is not a matter for some other group, but for *us* as a technical and human community.

We need to consider human rights in all the work that we do at W3C in the next 30 years. That includes reviews, but also the development of new standards and revisiting old standards. And to be successful we must be more broadly inclusive of participation from around the world.

To return to the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one article stands out to me:

“everyone has duties to the community” (Article 29)

We are here to celebrate the achievements of the standards-based Web, but also to recognize our duties to the community in supporting human rights in Web technology. 

I look forward to continuing that important work with you all.