Good evening, everyone. I'm Nick Doty, senior technologist at the Center for
Democracy and Technology, and it's genuinely such a pleasure to be here to celebrate the 30th
anniversary of W3C with you all.
For those who aren't familiar already, the Center for Democracy and Technology is a nonpartisan,
nonprofit organization, fighting to advance civil rights and civil liberties online. We shape
technology policy governance and design with a focus on equity and democratic values.
Now, CDT was an early organizational member of the World Wide Web Consortium in the 1990s,
and my predecessors, at CDT, have been participating in W3C standardization since at least 1995.
And, I am honored to be able to continue that long time tradition of civil society participation,
and to be here to speak about the work that we are all engaged in to support
human rights and web standards. Over those past 30 years, the web has been, I think,
an incredible boom for humanity and for human rights. You heard some of those examples already.
There may not be a singular source of human rights but the universal
declaration of human rights, adopted in 1948, should be especially meaningful to this
community, because of its consensus development by countries from around the world.
If you look through that important text, I see the impact of the web
in supporting a number of freedoms and rights. The freedom of
expression, the freedom of assembly and association, freedom from
discrimination. The human right that is access to public services.
The right to education, the right to work. Perhaps fundamentally, the right
to participate in cultural life. In other words, we use the web now for
political organizing, for news reporting, for social connections,
for health care, for interacting with our governments, our employers,
our schools, our friends and family. It's where we work and learn.
It's where we speak up and where we listen. And W3C has played an important
role in making those rights and freedoms a reality, through the
collaboration that we do on standards and interoperability. So that you
can access all those websites with all those different types of devices and software.
That recognition has been seen at the international level too.
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
recognize that importance on the role of technical standards in particular,
and a recent report to the Human Rights Council.
That report cites heavily the work of W3C as an example of considering human rights
impacts in technical standard setting. And anniversaries like this are a
fine time to reflect on those achievements and their importance to a
growing number of people around the world. But as the web has become an
essential part of public and community life, we must also realize the
very significant threat to human rights online.
This is not an exhaustive list but certainly those threats include surveillance and
threats to privacy. That's where I have spent much of my career, where many
of you have seen me discussing issues in your working groups.
It's also threats like discrimination, harassment and abuse. There are
threats like censorship, threats to freedom of expression, and association,
and, more fundamentally, threats to security, safety, dignity or our ongoing sustainability.
In recognizing those threats, we acknowledge, I think, a weighty and urgent
responsibility to protect users and to protect society in our standards work.
30 years ago, it was possible to log off, and leave the web behind for a time.
Now, for people in many places around the world, including
people living under dangerous and oppressive regimes, that's simply not an option.
We need to think about standards as if lives depend on them.
Because in fact they do.
Now, all those threats recognized, I remain an optimist about the potential for technologies,
especially the web, to strengthen human rights. That tomorrow can be better than today.
And to live up to that promise, our community will need to recommit itself to
the essential work of supporting human rights in the design of web technology.
So, human rights must not be an afterthought to the work that we're doing.
In today's world, there cannot be human rights offline if
they aren't protected online. And they can't be protected online without
the careful work of the people here today, the people online, among many others.
I am so proud of the work that's already ongoing, including the
ethical web principles from W3C TAG, the privacy principles which I hope
will be among our first statements published from the W3C.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and other work to make websites
accessible to all. Internationalization, you heard about, as an important
role for crossing borders and languages. From our colleagues at IETF, there's a
recently published set of guidelines for human rights protocol and architecture considerations.
And, I'm most especially proud of W3C's horizontal review process. That we consider these
crosscutting concerns across all of the web standards work that we do.
Still, there's more to be done. As an open multistakeholder standard setting body,
W3C has this precious opportunity to include, to collaborate on,
to address and proactively support human rights in web standards, in web technology.
This is not a matter for some other group to fix. But, for us, as a technical and as a human community.
We need to consider human rights in all the work that we do. In the W3C, at the next
thirty years. That includes reviews to be sure, but it also includes the
development of new standards and technology, and revisiting existing tech.
And to be successful, we must be more broadly inclusive of
participation from around the world. To return to the text of that
historical document, that I encourage you all to read, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
one article really stands out at the end of that document.
That, "everyone has duties to the community". Article 29. We are here to
celebrate the achievements of the standards based web, but also recognize
our duties to the community in supporting human rights in web technology.
I most sincerely look forward to continuing that important work with you all. Thank you.