US Congress hearing about the future of the Web

Thanks to Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead for bringing this to our attention earlier today. The US Congress House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Telcommunications and the Internet had its first hearing of the year last week. The subject was the Future of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web and Chair of the W3C) was the sole witness at this hearing.

Danny Weitzner, runs the W3C Technology and Society domain. Danny accompanied TimBL at the meeting and commentated as follows…

The topic and witness choice were notable for a couple of reasons. This is the first meeting of the committee in the new session of Congress and the Chair of the committee, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), announced his intention to take a long range look at the larger issues facing communications policy in the United States. This, by itself, is a wonderful idea. The fact that he decided to start this series of hearings with the World Wide Web, as opposed to so many other topics he might have chosen, really speaks to the central importance that the Web has in our society. The fact that he chose Tim to testify was great, too, IMHO.

You can read his full blog post here.

Why doesn’t this type of discussion happen outside the US? For example, why doesn’t the EU debate how to make better use of the Web, from the top down? There are lots of EU ‘funded’ projects that run in silo, but they’re not addressing the big picture. Come to think of it, why aren’t the US and the EU working together to ask the question about the future of the Web?

At least TimBL was at the hearing, as the W3C is impartial and strives to create and harmonize standards that are people, technology and location neutral.

One of the Committee members at the hearing raised the issue of the Web being used for great things, but also the possibility of people being exposed to inappropriate content.

TimBL responded to this very well, I’m sure he hears this a lot. I’ve cut down his response as I think it can be summed up in 9 words.

Every tool can be used for good or evil

That said, technology does enable users to exclude Web sites that contain inappropriate content. Using Content Labels is the best way to enable trust on the Web in my opinion as they allow users to read more information about Web sites from the search results screen, without having to enter the Web sites. Read the post I wrote last week about Content Labels if you want the ‘for dummies’ definition.