The other day, Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the Guardian that he’d like to discuss a new “Magna Carta” for the internet. “Magna Carta” is a headline gloss; what the inventor of the world wide web really wants, he says, is a bill of rights—some new document that addresses “principles of privacy, free speech and responsible anonymity":


What Berners-Lee is looking to do is admirable, in the abstract: He wants to preserve the “open, neutral” nature of the internet. And look, there’s a cleanly-designed website already available where you can sign up to help him do this, should that be your sort of thing.

Nonetheless, it's a quest probably destined to fail. Very real threats to the openness and neutrality of the internet are coming from several fronts: NSA surveillance and interference, the loss of net neutrality rules, the consolidation of internet providers. But it's difficult to imagine a way of enacting and passing a global internet bill of rights that would be enforceable, respected by either the world's governments or by the internet itself.


For starters, who would be in charge of passing such a thing, and how? There is no global internet version of the process described in this Schoolhouse Rock. Nor does the internet have a King John to enact a Magna Carta, if we’re gonna stick with that metaphor. Nor, if it were passed, are there any police to enforce it. Just go and ask some international law experts about how well things go when an agreement in principle contains no legitimate mechanism of enforcement.


Even if there were some way to magically make a binding document, there would remain the endless argument about the text and its precise meaning. Which principles of privacy and anonymity would it protect? As we saw in the whole Violentacrez debate, there is a significant constituency on the internet of people who are against "doxxing" under any circumstances. Still others believe that anything vaguely racy a young woman posts on the internet is fair game for spreading far and wide on the internet the internet because “she should have known better.” And yet others think any reasonable code of cyber civil rights would contain protections against such harassment. It's hard to imagine these people coming to terms on the parameters of privacy in any representative way.

The whole notion of enforcing principles about privacy and anonymity marks Berners-Lee's Magna Carta as something of a conservative concept, by internet-culture standards. There's significant sentiment that any kind of governance, beyond protecting "openness," is inherently inappropriate.

For those of you not around the internet back in 1998, John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote something called A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. It’s about having an open, neutral internet too. And it reads, in part:



Of course this document is old. But reading this now you can hear in it echoes of the philosophies of Anonymous, Wikileaks, even Redditors—all of whom would have to weigh in on this “bill of rights” for it to have even the remotest legitimacy among the users of the internet.

The manifesto and the strain of internet culture that's developed in its shadow show a fundamental admiration for the power of chaos. And for the power of so-called “acts of nature,” which bills of rights are not. Also there’s this bit, which seems to resist the very idea of being controlled by anything other than “liberty” itself:


So: no legal concepts. Like, for example, bills of rights. Got it. Not for the defenders of the “Independence of Cyberspace,” such things. And not to be too much of a cynic but: I suspect that’s more than just, you know, one guy’s opinion.

[Photo Credit: AP.]