A New Focus for the W3C: Improving the Web’s Integrity
The World Wide Web was conceived more than 25 years ago as a tool for sharing information. It has become much more than that; it is a fundamental part of the lives of much of humanity, enabling access to information, education, commerce and shopping, social experiences, civic functions, entertainment, and more.
The Web is a force for good; indeed, it has catalyzed major social changes. At the same time, the Web's phenomenal success has led to many unintended consequences that inflict significant distress on society: openness and anonymity enable scams, phishing, and fraud. Ease of gathering personal information spawned business models that mined and sold detailed user behaviors, without people’s awareness or consent. The acceleration of global information sharing enabled misinformation to flourish, be exploited for political or commercial gain, divide societies, and incite hate. We must do better. We must take steps to address these unintended consequences in the standards we develop.
Technology is not neutral; new technologies facilitate new actions, and enable new possibilities. We are proud of the good enabled by our web technologies; we will take the responsibility to use our values both to assess the potential and actual impact of our work (especially harms caused by that work), and to optimize these technologies throughout their lifecycles.
Our vision is for a World Wide Web that is more inclusive, and more respectful of its users: a Web that supports truth better than falsehood, people more than profits, humanity rather than hate.
We will improve the fundamental integrity of the Web platform. The Web will not only grow in scope and importance in our lives; it will grow in respect for its users, grow in the trust of its users, grow in its inclusion of all humanity as its users.
Our new vision is built on these twin pillars:
- Our existing pillar, on which we built the web: the enormous potential of technological change.
- Our new pillar for the years ahead: recognition and embodiment of fundamental values into the architecture of the web.
These are the core values of the Web:
- The Web is for all humanity.
- The Web is designed for the good of its users.
- The Web must be safe for its users.
- There is one interoperable world-wide Web.
The W3C will function with these strategic principles:
- Put the needs of users first: above authors, publishers, implementers, paying W3C Members, or theoretical purity.
- Ensure transparency, equity and fairness. Our work should not be exclusively dominated by any person, company or interest group.
- Ensure that the Web can work for everyone, striving for diversity and inclusion of participants from different geographical locations, cultures, languages, accessibility needs, gender identities, and more. Continue to champion accessibility and internationalization as core principles for the Web.
- Make the web trustworthy, by ensuring security and privacy for users.
- Ensure the Web does not favor centralization.
- Drive interoperability across vendors and implementations using open test suites, a strong patent policy and open copyright licenses
- Encourage incubation in new areas and industries with open platforms for discussion, collaboration and innovation
The W3C's purpose is to:
- Provide an open forum for discussions for organizations of all sizes (from single-person companies to multi-nationals).
- Ensure that standards are developed with consensus of industry and key stakeholders.
- Maintain and develop a unified Web architecture, which continues to address evolving use cases.
- Build and maintain respected relationships with governments and businesses for providing credible advice.
- Ensure efforts on accessibility and internationalization continue to achieve the goal of a Web for everyone.
- Ensure that the evolving Web platform and Web technologies improve in integrity, security and privacy. We must revisit the current Web platform and explore how we can responsibly improve personal privacy for users.
- Evolve the extensible web architecture to empower industries and individuals to address the evolving user’s needs.
- Improve efforts on new technology incubation, making it more structured and improving consensus-building among key stake holders.
- Achieve worldwide participation, diversity and inclusion, establishing W3C as representative of the worldwide community.
- Further improve the environment for facilitating balance, equity and cooperation among the participants from different industries, user groups and organizational sizes.
- Increase involvement of under-represented key stakeholders such as end users, content creators, developers etc.
- Establish and improve collaborative relationships with other organizations in the domain of Internet and Web standards.
We are:
- an open forum where diverse voices from around the world and industries come together, incubate and build consensus for global standards for Web technologies.
- socially responsible and committed to ensure that the Web is for everyone; we greatly emphasize accessibility, internationalization, privacy, security and diversity.
- committed to developing open and royalty-free standards with high focus on interoperability and collective empowerment.
These define the global brand of the W3C.
- This document is intended to be a stronger vision statement for the W3C. This is currently exposed as a work item of the W3C Advisory Board, on the AB wiki.
- This document is the result of many people's work, notably Chris Wilson, David Singer, Mike Champion, Tantek Çelik, Tzviya Siegman, Avneesh Singh and the rest of the Advisory Board.
- This document builds on the basis of the Technical Architecture Group's excellent Ethical Web Principles. It is not intended to supplant that work nor redefine it, but fit into the same framework and promote many of the same goals.
- This document also builds on a specific history of the W3C's growth and success.