Vicki MacLeod, GTWN Secretary General Emeritus and International Board Member
“The Web will be a place where the whim of a human being and the reasoning of a machine coexist in an ideal, powerful mixture.” Tim Berners-Lee, “Weaving the Web” (1999)
A utopian vision
On August 6, 1991, the web’s first page, http://info.cern.ch, went online, introducing itself as “a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”
In 1994, the BBC’s TV program Tomorrow’s World excitedly encouraged viewers to “imagine a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and every film ever shot could be viewed instantly in your own home.”1 Looking back from today’s perspective, this seems incredibly naïve, especially as the reporter at the time did not even contemplate any potential downsides of enabling anyone to have open access to your home.
Governments and regulators soon began, however, to contemplate the challenge of controlling this new digital world, whilst not fully understanding its future direction and the extent of its influence on our lives. The US Telecommunications Act of 1996 attempted to strike a balance between these competing forces, by codifying the Federal Communications Commission’s distinction between traditional telecommunications on the one hand and ‘information services’ on the other, to give the private sector much more latitude to innovate. This approach was generally followed around the world as the internet expanded its reach, with an uneasy tension between what we could call the US approach on the one hand, and that of European regulators on the other, who have always been much more willing to take a regulatory approach to solving digital issues than their US counterparts.
There were many over the past three decades who tried to draw attention to the increasing dangers of the digital world. In July 1995, for example, the cover of Time Magazine spurred an early panic over children and the internet. Under an image of a wide-eyed child hovering over a keyboard and the bold headline, “Cyberporn”, it posed the question: “Can we protect our kids — and free speech?”
Despite these concerns, the culture of treating the digital world as different to the ‘real world’ persisted, with governments often being unwilling, or unable to intervene. In regulatory policy terms, technology companies continued to portray the online world much as the original web pioneers envisaged it to be – a benign, safe space for all, different to any other form of communication medium and largely subject to its own form of self-regulation.
This culture often continues to determine regulatory policy today, largely because of the extraordinary success of the US digital services market and the fear that over regulation of the digital world will stifle its growth and innovation and kill the goose that has laid many golden eggs.
Waking up to online dangers
But if we can step back and view the reality that we now all face online, those of us who can remember these early days of the online age may wonder how we ended up where we are today – with a digital world full of spam, fake news, cyberbullying, abuse, social media predators and AI generated deepfake pornography, to name but a few of the online dangers.
Parents and those responsible for looking after children and the vulnerable, faced with this online reality and seeing these dangers continue to grow, have begun to pressure governments and regulators to do something to keep their families safe online. There has also been frequent media coverage of, amongst other things, disturbing examples of young victims of cyber abuse and bullying taking their own lives, while paedophile gangs groom children online and destroy their futures.
In response, governments and regulators are now taking online safety very seriously and are introducing innovative approaches to protect users online, while hopefully still enabling young people to enjoy the social and educational benefits of the digital world.
Being safe online
From a slow start, governments around the world are now treating online safety with the priority it deserves. In fact, there has been a growing competition between authorities for claiming credit for being the first to introduce various regulations, covering such things as mobile phone bans in schools, online content classification systems, and social media bans.2
The Australian e-Safety Commission has a specific website designed for kids, setting out how kids themselves (not just their parents and carers) can learn to look after themselves online and avoid being harmed.3 Australia has also been a pioneer in taking a proactive approach by legislating social media age restrictions, which came into effect on 10 December 2025.4 This despite initial push back from some in the industry as well as free speech advocates.
The difficult decisions facing tech companies in controlling kids’ access to their services is evidenced by Pinterest CEO Bill Ready, who started calling in 2024 for a US national standard for age verification, to better protect children online. He also made a controversial decision to turn off social features for users under 16, which at the time caused Pinterest’s stock price to fall dramatically, but ultimately encouraged Gen Z users to join the platform. They now now represent about 40% of its user base.
Another example of industry initiatives is Instagram’s Teen Accounts, which are automatically applied to users aged 13 to 17. They have built-in limits on who can contact them and the content which they see. According to Instagram, ‘sensitive content’ is filtered out from accounts which teens do not follow and they can only be messaged or tagged by people whom they follow or to whom they are already connected. Offensive words and phrases are also filtered out of comments and message requests. Teens will also get notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day.
What can and should tech firms do?
In an interview with the BBBC’s Outlook program in late 2025, Sir Tim Berners-Lee reflected on the 35 years since he created the Web.5 While recognising the dangers of the digital world, the Web has now become indispensable to most, if not all, of our daily lives and has changed the way we interact forever. So what can we as users, and importantly, the digital tech industry itself, do now to make the internet a safer and more inclusive space for us all?
It is often said that to protect your home from burglaries, you need to think like a thief and ‘case the joint’ to find the vulnerabilities.
Similarly, to protect the vulnerable online, tech firms need to take a far more proactive stance and imagine the worst that human beings can do. Taking this approach, new products and services could include ‘safety by design’ features from the outset. This approach would generate more trust from consumers, and governments, and would create market advantage for the companies that demonstrate their real concern for online safety.
If not, as AI takes over control of online content, trust in digital services will be further eroded and may lead people to avoid online spaces, to prevent themselves and their children from falling victim to online harms.
Vicki MacLeod is an ICT specialist with considerable experience in Australia and internationally in telecommunications and digital media. Vicki is a former Executive Director of the International Institute of Communications (IIC) based in London and has held senior policy and strategy positions in both industry and government.
Vicki was Secretary-General of the Global Telecom Women’s Network (GTWN) from 1998 until 2024 and during this time was also the Editor-in-Chief of the GTWN’s publications, including The Mobile Century: Life and Work in the Digital Era. Vicki is also a member of the Board of Directors of OWNSAT (Oceania Women’s Network Satellite Pty Ltd), a Singapore-based satellite investment arm which was the first investor in satellite broadband startup Kacific.
