Civilizing the Web's ethical wildness

A dozen or so years since arriving on the scene, the Web is still an ethical adolescent.

from the September 19, 2007 edition

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Ironically, this acceptance of anonymity has brought with it inventive violations of privacy. Data anonymously acquired on corporate servers tell their owners – based on what you're doing, spending, and looking at – more about who you "really are" than you probably want them to know. This surrender of privacy has become a discomfort we accept.

Consider three radically different options for civilizing the Web: one, effective but culturally unlikely; a second, less effective but easy; and a third, ineffective but perhaps inevitable.

Option 1: Create a parallel Web and certificate system where, by consent, users gain and retain access by maintaining their real information in a secure central registry, which has the authority to set standards for privacy, adjudicate bad behavior, and suspend or revoke access. This would roughly coincide with the extinction of civil libertarians everywhere. But it would certainly cut spam.

Option 2: To address the worst of the Web, Internet service providers (ISPs) should own up to their role in hosting one-to-many content. They're not the same as telecom and post, which carry one-to-one, private messages. Once exploitive and illegal content is reported to them, they should drop websites and usenet newsgroups that traffic in it. Today, too often, they don't bother. As motivation, the sites that rate those ISPs could add a "responsibility index" – allowing users to rate responsiveness to requests to shut down illegal websites. ISPs have brands to protect. Even a modest number of subscribers who consider a social-responsibility rating when making renewal decisions will make a difference.

Option 3: Continue on as we have, inviting a patchwork of legal and legislative cures, as government tries to fix what's most broken. The ISPs will bear the brunt of it, and none of us will be happy with it.

There is a fourth option. That's for the third parties who carry and monetize the Web's content to attend more carefully to the social and business environment they create and profit from – before government does it for them. In time, they have to answer an important question: whether the ethics of civil society are integral, or immaterial, to the Web's future success.

• Mark Lange is a former presidential speechwriter.

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