The value (driven) web

Abstract

This paper presents a vision on the importance of values and ethical aspects in web science. We
create(d) the Internet, but now the Internet (technology) is shaping our world increasingly: the way
we experience, interact, transact, conduct business et cetera. The Internet is ubiquitous and vital to
many aspects of our society; it is substituting some of our existing infrastructures and its traffic
becomes a reflection of our society. The complexity of the Internet grows fast and might at some
point transcend that of ourselves. At the same time the Internet escapes our normative, ethical
control. Though it is value-laden, the process of embedding values in internet technology is mostly
implicit and obscured by both the strong technological focus and distributive nature of internet
technology and services. This distributive nature reflects amongst other things the result of an
increased institutionalization of functionally decomposed economical and societal products and
services in all the sectors that contribute to the GDP. This trend of decomposition clashes with the
desires of all ¿prosumers¿ using the Internet and require integrated, composed products and
services that they can identify and associate with in a human way. User values and expectations
must be met by the products and services. This is a potential tipping point where supply and
demand, producers and consumers, political society and technology may be drifting apart. Thus,
web science is confronted with a crucial challenge and a huge responsibility. We argue that in
order for the Internet to evolve and mature into a long term sustainable organic extension of our
society, we must explicitly recognize the importance of values. This is a first step towards
embedding the values that society recognizes as important. Values concerned do not solely deal
with privacy, but also with security, transparency, trust, user autonomy et cetera. The challenge for
all involved in the development of the Internet and in the provision of services is to define the
values that matter and to bring them to bear upon technology, software architecture, standards,
code et cetera. In this paper, we set out to identify some of the vital values and norms that will
enable us to mould the Internet according to societal ideals. Working within the approach of value
sensitive design, we sketch how we can capture, formalize and embed a balanced set of values in
internet technology as non-functional requirements