Editor: Rigo Wenning
Status: Final
Visibility: Public
Object: Vision for W3C W3C Group Note, 2 April 2025
The Formal Objection did not result in a proposal and the Objector suggested the document not to be published as a W3C Statement, leading to the creation of Council to take a decision.
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”.
- This is an unsubstantiated and debated claim.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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., labeling sensitive categories of information).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
The Objector formally objects to a phrase that they already objected against for the TAG's Statement on Ethical Web Principles. The Principles were objected, mainly because of an opposition against the expression that "technology is not neutral". As for the formal objection against the Web Vision, the opposition against the Ethical Web Principles was done because the Objector is of the opinion that W3C should only make "neutral" technical standards. Those neutral technical specifications would then be used for good or bad and the judgment about good or bad would be done outside W3C.
The claim that only purely neutral technical arguments should be made was rejected by the Council on 6 December 2024. The Team Report had enumerated several areas in W3C like accessibility, that are not ethically neutral technical specifications. The formal objection against the Ethical Web principles was overruled.
The dispute around the question whether W3C aims to produce specifications that are purely technical documents or whether they also contain ethical choices was decided for the Ethical Web Principles. But is this a general precedent, given that the W3C Vision Note is another document? There are certainly situations, where it is wise not to take past decisions into account because the underlying facts are too different. But the W3C Vision Note refers to the Ethical Web Principles and the objection is directed solely against a citation of those Principles in the introduction. Given that the effort for formal objections is relatively low, but the effort to resolve them is asymmetrically high if due process is followed, it follows that things already decided would be very expensive to be decided every time they occur. In this sense, the present objection is a disguised repeated objection against the Ethical Web Principles. The question for the council is, whether this could or should lead to a short procedure, and whether this really makes the selection of a council necessary. A limited standing committee or the Team may be appropriate to remove the asymmetric nature of repeated or obstructionist objections, that, by their nature, may create a denial of service threat on the Consortium.
The Vision for W3C is a succinct document. It contains an introduction, reminding the sources for the creation of the W3C Vision and then 4 points representing a Core Vision, some more general statements and a set of Operational Principles. The objection is directed against a statement in the introduction. But the introduction has no normative content and does not participate in the normative value of sections 3 - 5. The objection then gives eight arguments, why the claim "technology is not neutral" is wrong. The objection is not directed against any of the normative content of the W3C Vision Document. To the contrary, the Objector, in their statement, strongly support the goals of the W3C Vision Note. There is in fact no explicit objection against normative content of the W3C Vision Note, just an implicit one where some statements could be interpreted beyond mere technical statements. But this implicit opposition is in the eye of the beholder and cannot be assessed effectively in this report.
The Objector was given a deadline from 12 June 2025 until 24 June 2025 for feedback on the precedent. A first notification from 03 June was said to be addressed to the wrong working email address of the natural person representing the Objector.
The Team gave the objector a hint that this is a repetition in order to allow them to substantiate their opposition, given that it is mainly a repetition. No further substantive arguments were brought forward other than those already cited above. Attempts to erase the disputed sentence were considered not sufficient. On the other side, the editors of the document also refused to remove that sentence. Despite being non-normative, both sides insisted that the phrase that has a referral to the Ethical Web Principles as its main function, is important for the Vision Note. The debate further revealed that this Formal objection is directed against the Vision Document, but has its roots in a dispute between the objector and the industry they represent and other technology providers over ending third party cookies for the collection of personal data.
Given the analysis, the Team recommends to overrule the formal objection, suggests to use the Unanimous Short Circuit Procedure and proceed with the publication of the "Vision for W3C" as a W3C Statement.