For the past eighteen months, CASM at Demos have been asking one question: when thinking about the future of the web, what does good look like?
We often struggle to articulate what a good Internet would look like. And that’s a problem: from Beijing to Silicon Valley, future Internets are being brought to life. While others are making headway liberal democracies are too often focused on the harms they want removed or changed.
To realise a Good Web – a web compatible and supportive of liberal democratic principles – we need to flip the script and challenge the status quo with proactive plans. We must understand that democracies need things to work: public space, private space, access to good quality information, freedom of expression and protections for human rights – and that these things should be digitally provisioned with public oversight or ownership.
Our director of CASM Alex’s last report, The Good Web Project, makes the case that in the development of the Internet, some critical democratic functions have been left in the hands of non-democratic actors, and that those functions should be moved into the layer of democratic infrastructure.