Re: [/TR/w3c-vision/] Formal Objection (Proposed Statement review)

The Council overruled the Formal Objection unanimously via the USC
procedure.

https://www.w3.org/2025/06/team-report-vision.html


On 5/9/2025 2:35 PM, Philippe Le Hégaret wrote:
> From
>    https://www.w3.org/wbs/33280/Vision2025/results/
> 
> <Member> wrote:
> [[
> We firmly believe in the Open Web designed for “all”.
> 
> Open neutral technical standards to navigate, interact, and transact 
> with many diverse web properties’ content and services is essential for 
> society.
> 
> As web properties will have varying economic means we must have a vision 
> that supports unified standards that support interoperability across 
> organizations in contrast to proprietary or restrictive protocols which 
> might limit the innovation and competition required for a modern Open 
> Web to flourish.
> 
> We also strongly support the goals of this document, emphasizing why the 
> open standards of the web matter, communicating why the principles of 
> openness and decentralization matter to fostering online diversity, and 
> ensuring that the document is useful but “timeless enough” to focus on 
> needs of the stakeholders that generate and support the web, without 
> “needing frequent revision.”
> 
> The document properly notes that the core functionality of the open 
> standards of the web have been conceived to share information, which has 
> enabled sharing communication, sharing entertainment, sharing opinions 
> and knowledge, and sharing commerce.
> 
> However, despite the agreement on vision, goals and principles, we 
> regretfully must submit a formal objection based the statement 
> “technology is not neutral”.
> 
> 1. This is an unsubstantiated and debated claim.
> 
> 2. What are the politics of a brick? Is it a building material or a 
> weapon? We maintain that the brick is merely a combination of elements, 
> but whether we perceive it as a building material or a weapon depends on 
> how it is used.
> 
> 3. Therein lies the rub. The brick and any technology are neutral. How 
> people, with free will, choose to use technology, can be for good or 
> ill. However, restricting technology only to “good people” seems like a 
> challenge beyond the remit, skill and perhaps even practicality of the 
> W3C’s members and its mission as a neutral technical standards body.
> 
> 4. We must recognize that any technology, from building materials, to 
> transportation, to communication, can be used by good people and bad 
> people. Instead of focusing on building bricks or other components that 
> will only be used in good ways, we suggest we make it easier to 
> facilitate communication between online players as to who they are (when 
> they choose to associate their identity with their communication) and 
> how they perceive the information they are communicating (e.g., 
> labelling sensitive categories of information).
> 
> 5. This raises the challenge of when an individual or an organization 
> does not want to disclose who they are or the possibility that a bad 
> actor (even a bad state actor) might violate this preference. We submit 
> such a challenge is not possible to address to the technology layer and 
> in any case by a neutral technical standards body such as the W3C.
> 
> 6. All proposals to date require placing trust in some organization 
> (first data hop), and then hoping that such an organization will not 
> violate this trust. However, just as it is impossible to detect and 
> distinguish good from bad people in advance of their actions, it is 
> impossible to know that such an organization will abide by its promise, 
> internal policies and external contracts to eliminate all risk.
> 
> 7. Given the principle we want to design standards that “avoid 
> centralization” and support “interoperability,” we should focus on 
> communicating trust factors, rather than designing systems that require 
> centralizing trust in single organizations. Accordingly, all such 
> complexity involved in such centralization proposals could be better 
> addressed by highlighting the reasons why any entity (consumer or 
> business) ought to trust any organization and how such trust could be 
> validated by an independent third party. The sanctions against any 
> violations of trust ought to rely on the legal systems of each nation, 
> as the W3C is not staffed, structured nor desirous of becoming a world- 
> wide legislature and court. The technology layer alone cannot address 
> government failures where they exist, and it is not the scope of the W3C 
> as a neutral technical standards body to interfere in such matters.
> 
> 8. The good news is that data protection laws do not require we 
> eliminate all risk and reduce it to zero. Instead, Europe, the UK and US 
> data protection laws all consistently rely on a “reasonableness” 
> evaluation under the circumstances which is context specific to each 
> organization.
> 
> Given the W3C is not structured to and does not want to be a police 
> state, we submit we acknowledge the limits of technology and clearly 
> distinguish its neutrality from its use.
> 
> We should have a vision and principles that make it easier for 
> recipients to understand the metadata applied to information shared (by 
> the sender or by others who wish to enrich it) and even the identity of 
> who is sharing it (when either consumers or organizations volunteer this).
> 
> Instead of engaging on the bad uses, we suggest taking the higher 
> principle road that neutral technology cannot judge whether a future use 
> will be good or bad, or be used only by “good” people.
> ]]

Received on Friday, 1 August 2025 19:16:25 UTC