Tim Berners Lee Identifies Threats To Democracy

http://bit.ly/7XwAG

MY ARTICLE BELOW WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN TECHNORATI

                                                                                                    

A new political era has begun unnoticed with the arrival of the social media and the web integrated hand held device. You may call it instant democracy, interactive democracy or digital democracy, but the voice of the people is getting louder and is no longer heard once in an electoral cycle. Though you could have a clear mandate and a comfortable majority in the congress or the parliament, you are today forced to check back on public opinion repeatedly. The big difference is that public opinion is no longer only the opinion of the media barons, the celebs or the social networker but of the digitally empowered internet user.....nearly 3billion owners of the hand held and desktop devices. Tim Berners Lee called the father of the World Wide Web in the December Edition of Scientific American said  “The web is critical not merely to the digital revolution, but our continued prosperity- even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending”

Tracing back the history, Berners Lee recalls that the charter of the World Wide Web consortium was drawn from the principles of the US constitution and the British Magna Carter among several others. The principles of an egalitarian society where all are equal immaterial of race, colour, class, wealth or nation is embodied in the web today. It has become the beacon of democracy and is more critical to free speech than any other medium, because it is perhaps the least censored most used and universally connected resource in the world.
The digital democracy we enjoy today is quite different from the days of the Cleisthenes of Athens, Disraeli or Thomas Jefferson. We have our say outside the hallowed halls of the parliament, the congress or the courts, and our leaders be it Obama, Putin or Wen Jiabao make effort to connect and listen to the public opinion created by us and accessible on the internet. Not only political leaders, but even all powerful corporate organisations like BP, Goldman Sachs, Nestle, Rio Tinto or Arch Coal, are slowly coming around, listening to opinion on the web and taking action. In short democracy is flying today with wings from the internet.
What a shame, if the wings of free speech are clipped and no flying zones demarcated especially by those who thrive on the internet. Tim Berners Lee says that those out to break up the interconnected web into islands of profit like Facebook, Apple, or Verizon and snoop on our private information for monetary gains are the enemies of Web. In the true democratic tradition we must fight from being snooped on, filtered, censored or disconnected by monopolies and totalitarian Governments that are damaging the concept of single universal information space. Berners Lee is possibly right in saying that the big internet companies are encroaching our fundamental right to accessibility and privacy by their code of conduct. The big question however is who can stop them?
Can web users rally against internet giants and battle the powerful monopolies in the courts to win the right to what Berners Lee originally designed....... a free, barrier less world wide web.