Tim Berners-Lee: Let's Build the World We Want, Not Defend Against the One We Don't

PARIS – You can encrypt all your data, build virtual fences around your home and forbid your children from ever posting on social media. Or you can help build a world where we can safely live our lives online without fear for our lives offline. Sir Tim Berners-Lee prefers that second option, he said today at LeWeb.

We use the web for all these intimate things, and we have to be able to do it without feeling someone looking over our shoulder."

Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist, is the reason I'm here writing and you're here reading me: he invented the World Wide Web. In 1989, working at CERN, he wrote a proposal for an interactive information management system marrying the existing concepts of hyperlinks and the Internet. What drove him then was frustration: scientists worked on many different types of machines that did not communicate. To ensure knowledge wasn't lost, each new team member had to spend days in briefing upon arriving – and days in debriefing upon leaving. "I wanted the Web to be this huge collaborative environment, where everything that you know you could put in and everything that it knows, you could pull out," Berners-Lee said.

"It's our society, we can define it"

Luckily for all of us, the Web became much more than a working tool for CERN researchers. But as it grew, a battle for control started. A battle between those building fences and those trying to peer over them – or bulldoze them altogether. A battle between privacy and invasion of privacy, encryptions and hacks. "That's no way to run a planet," Berners-Lee argues.

We would like to have a world in which the Web is neutral. We can say, 'I prefer a world like this.' One where when I employ somebody, I can't look at their childhood social media history. Because that's a better world to live in.

It's our society, we build it, we can define it.

The "right to be forgotten" makes sense if the information in question is false; otherwise it's just redacting history. Rather than hide information, let's make sure its use is regulated. Let's move, Berners-Lee continues, "from saying 'you're not allowed to talk about the fact it happened,' to 'you can talk about it, but it can't affect your employment decisions.'" Much like – and I'm expanding on Berners-Lee's argument here – age, race or marital status, while easily available to a recruiter, still cannot be used against you in a job interview. And what applies to jobs applies to insurance premiums, college acceptance or civil rights.

"Don't watch the battle go by"

How do we take back control and build the world we want? We start by educating ourselves. Elected officials and the people who elect them should know code, not to build the next Facebook, but to write laws with a real understanding of what technology can do. "The social systems we build are partly technology, partly laws," he says.

An understanding of technology has helped mobilize millions against attempts to undo net neutrality. Ordinary activists have stopped SOPA and PIPA; lawmakers in Europe and Brazil are taking a stand. But on the other side of the fight, telcos, ISPs and companies used to telling you what to watch on TV form a powerful lobby, Berners-Lee said. It takes every Web user to defend an open Web.

You spend 95% of your time using the Web as a technology. You need to use 5% of that time looking at the legal situation. Join that battle, don't just watch it go by."

What drives him now is frustration too: "We're so not yet done."

Author's note: This post originally included a section about TBL's take on robots taking over the workplace. I decided to break it out into a separate post, which you can read here.