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

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, 9 May 2025 18:35:45 UTC