Internet 'Magna Carta' Vote Launched by British Library | Hacker News Reader

Internet 'Magna Carta' Vote Launched by British Library

bbc.com

So the 'votes' here have nothing to do with the spirit of the Magna Carta so I'm not certain why the BBC linked them.

The Magna Carta was a concession made by the king of England (he had to make them, or he would have been killed) to limit his power and to accept that the person holding the throne was not above the law.

This vote had more to do with regulation of the internet by state mandate and enforcement. Pretty divergent.

It's disappointing to hear that the report is on more youth voting for safety over freedom online. The original mythical promise of the internet was a sort of freedom that of course never came to pass - where free speech could not be censored, where information was traded without cost and where propaganda would not and could not lurk.

The past three decades, especially the most recent one, have proven this wrong.

A managed, regulated and enforced internet is an interesting idea - on that protect people from dangerous ideas and information - but it's also a scary and an alien one; it's an idea that Western governments have consistently criticized other countries for doing.

I myself think that law enforcement is here to protect civil liberties, and that civil liberties are only to be given up in times of great struggle and only upon the highest of imperatives.

I know that the West is being significantly challenged to keep its place in the world, but I don't know that this shift in the winds is one of those great imperatives.

Yeah -- it seems that the clauses that the students provided were aspirational goals. I can support the goal of having a malware free web, but I have no idea how to achieve that. Part of the problem is that there is no good definition of malware (also, where is the dividing line between malware and adware?).

It is an interesting experiment, but I fear that we will discover that the youth of tomorrow want safety first and everything else second. Maybe this is the privilege that comes from growing up in an age where life is pretty good and basic freedoms are assumed. I suspect that the peoples who have fought to gain their freedoms would have a different perspective.

> It's disappointing to hear that the report is on more youth voting for safety over freedom online.

Emphasis on "youth". Glancing at it I see very few proposals from anyone over the age of 16. In their short lives I doubt they have experienced enough to balance their idealism with pragmatism.

The Magna Carta and other writings that have had similar influence on human rights are remarkable not only for their idealism but that they were written by people who understood the reality of the current political environment. They were able to create positive change that was actionable and not overly optimistic.

Asking the opinion of 10 and 11-year olds gives you a sense of the next generation's hopes and fears (or in many cases those of their parents), and that's not to be dismissed or belittled. But I don't see it being a reliable guideline for establishing policy.

I'm not sure that the general public could end up with something as eloquent and succinctly expressed as John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace[1].

[1]: https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

Subjectively most British adults are frighteningly passive to surveillance and seem oblivious to losing privacy rights, I would not want British people to create the Magna Carta of the internet!

Disclaimer, I am British.

Unfortunately the same attitude is quite common everywhere. I agree though that the UK does seem to have an especially bad case of it. I'm a Brit too but I've lived almost half my almost 60 years in Norway where the state is just as keen to introduce things like data retention.

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