TED is 30.
The world wide web is celebrating this month
its 25th anniversary.
So I've got a question for you.
Let's talk about the journey, mainly about the future.
Let's talk about the state.
Let's talk about what sort of a web we want.
So 25 years ago, then, I was working at CERN.
I got permission in the end after about a year
to basically do it as a side project.
I wrote the code.
I was I suppose the first user.
There was a lot of concern
that people didn't want to pick it up
because it would be too complicated.
A lot of persuasion, a lot of wonderful
collaboration with other people,
and bit by bit, it worked.
It took off. It was pretty cool.
And in fact, a few years later in 2000,
five percent of the world population
were using the world wide web.
In 2007, seven years later, 17 percent.
In 2008, we formed the World Wide Web Foundation
partly to look at that
and worry about that figure.
And now here we are in 2014,
and 40 percent of the world
are using the world wide web, and counting.
Obviously it's increasing.
I want you to think about both sides of that.
Okay, obviously to anybody here at TED,
the first question you ask is, what can we do
to get the other 60 percent on board
as quickly as possible?
Lots of important things. Obviously it's going to be around mobile.
But also, I want you to think about the 40 percent,
because if you're sitting there yourself
sort of with a web-enabled life,
you don't remember things anymore,
you just look them up,
then you may feel that it's been a success
and we can all sit back.
But in fact, yeah, it's been a success,
there's lots of things, Khan Academy
for crying out loud, there's Wikipedia,
there's a huge number of free e-books
that you can read online,
lots of wonderful things for education,
things in many areas.
Online commerce has in some cases
completely turned upside down the way commerce works altogether,
made types of commerce available
which weren't available at all before.
Commerce has been almost universally affected.
Government, not universally affected,
but very affected, and on a good day,
lots of open data, lots of e-government,
so lots of things which are visible
happening on the web.
Also, lots of things which are less visible.
The healthcare, late at night when they're worried
about what sort of cancer
somebody they care about might have,
when they just talk across the Internet to somebody
who they care about very much in another country.
Those sorts of things are not, they're not out there,
and in fact they've acquired a certain amount of privacy.
So we cannot assume that part of the web,
part of the deal with the web,
is when I use the web,
it's just a transparent, neutral medium.
I can talk to you over it without worrying
about what we in fact now know is happening,
without worrying about the fact
that not only will surveillance be happening
but it'll be done by people who may abuse the data.
So in fact, something we realized,
we can't just use the web,
we have to worry about
what the underlying infrastructure of the whole thing,
is it in fact of a quality that we need?
We revel in the fact that we have this wonderful free speech.
We can tweet, and oh, lots and lots of people
can see our tweets, except when they can't,
except when actually Twitter is blocked from their country,
or in some way the way we try to express ourselves
has put some information about the state of ourselves,
the state of the country we live in,
which isn't available to anybody else.
So we must protest and make sure
that censorship is cut down,
that the web is opened up
where there is censorship.
We love the fact that the web is open.
It allows us to talk. Anybody can talk to anybody.
It doesn't matter who we are.
And then we join these big
social networking companies
which are in fact effectively built as silos,
so that it's much easier to talk to somebody
in the same social network
than it is to talk to somebody in a different one,
so in fact we're sometimes limiting ourselves.
And we also have, if you've read the book about the filter bubble,
the filter bubble phenomenon is that
we love to use machines
which help us find stuff we like.
So we love it when we're bathed in
what things we like to click on,
and so the machine automatically feeds us
the stuff that we like and we end up
with this rose-colored spectacles view of the world
called a filter bubble.
So here are some of the things which maybe
threaten the social web we have.
What sort of web do you want?
I want one which is not fragmented into lots of pieces,
as some countries have been suggesting
they should do in reaction to recent surveillance.
I want a web which has got, for example,
is a really good basis for democracy.
I want a web where I can use healthcare
with privacy and where there's a lot
of health data, clinical data is available
to scientists to do research.
I want a web where the other 60 percent
get on board as fast as possible.
I want a web which is such a powerful basis for innovation
that when something nasty happens,
some disaster strikes, that we can respond
by building stuff to respond to it very quickly.
So this is just some of the things that I want,
from a big list, obviously it's longer.
You have your list.
I want us to use this 25th anniversary
to think about what sort of a web we want.
You can go to webat25.org
and find some links.
There are lots of sites where people
have started to put together a Magna Carta,
a bill of rights for the web.
How about we do that?
How about we decide, these are, in a way,
becoming fundamental rights, the right to communicate with whom I want.
What would be on your list for that Magna Carta?
Let's crowdsource a Magna Carta
for the web.
Let's do that this year.
Let's use the energy from the 25th anniversary
to crowdsource a Magna Carta
to the web. (Applause)
Thank you. And do me a favor, will you?
Fight for it for me. Okay? Thanks.
(Applause)