It took all of us to build the web that we have. It will take all of us to secure its future.

Half of the world’s population still can’t get online. For the other half, the web’s benefits seem to come with far too many unacceptable risks: to our privacy, our democracy, our health and security.

The Contract for the Web is an effort to bring governments, companies, civil society and web users together to build a roadmap for how we build a web that serves humanity and is a public good for everyone, everywhere.

The Contract for the Web will become a strong mechanism for each party to be held accountable for doing their part to build an open and free web.

Those who back the Contract Principles will have the opportunity to shape a full contract through a collaborative process with governments, companies, and individual web users negotiating specific actions to be taken by each party to help us realise this ambition. The full contract will completed in 2019.

This effort is guided by others’ past work on digital and human rights, including:

• African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms

• African Platform on Access to Information Declaration

• APC Internet Rights Charter (Association for Progressive Communications)

• Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union

• Corporate Accountability Index, Ranking Digital Rights

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), European Union

• Declaration on the Digital Future, GSMA

• The Human Rights Principles for Connectivity and Development, Access Now

• Joint declaration on freedom of expression and the Internet, OSCE

• Mobile User Privacy Bill of Rights, Electronic Frontier Foundation

• The Mozilla Manifesto, Mozilla

• Ro Khanna’s Internet Bill of Rights

• The Toronto Declaration, Access Now & Amnesty International

• Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations