China’s “great firewall” trucks no nonsense and encircles a censored version of the web that people outside the country would not recognise.

Defying that censorship can have serious consequences. Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, is languishing in prison as a result - with a little help from Yahoo that saw its boss Jerry Yang heavily criticised by a US congressional committee last year.

So its more than a little surprising to find that the venerable World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - which oversees web standards and organises education and discussion about the web - is lending its credibility to a Beijing conference on the web’s future with this theme:

“One World, One Web”.

Someone can’t count. Surely, with China’s censored web, a more honest motto would be “One World, Two Webs”. Heck, count Iran, too, and let’s make it three (etcetera).
Called WWW2008, the conference is organised by the Swiss-based International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (IW3C2) - a body on whose board the W3C has one member. Whether or not you take issue with the IW3C2’s decision to site this year’s conference in a web-censoring state, the “One World, One Web” theme is galling.

I’m not the only one - this blogger agrees, saying: “The theme of the conference is ‘One World, One Web’. China’s Great Firewall is the antithesis of this claim”.

W3C chief and web inventor Tim Berners-Lee is giving a keynote speech and there is also a web standards conference track under the auspices of W3C. So I asked W3C spokesman Ian Jacobs what was behind W3C’s backing for an event under such a misleading banner.

He replied:

“W3C as an organisation engages in dialogue and builds consensus with all people [his emphasis] to work toward the goal of One Web, a Web that is open, accessible, and interoperable for all. Through international dialog, we seek to understand the particular technology needs of diverse communities and how to meet those needs through open standards.”

“W3C launched an Office in China in 2006 to engage the Chinese industrial and academic communities in the development of international Web standards. We are participating in technical meetings in Beijing in April 2008 to further our understanding.”

All very worthy. As Winston Churchill said: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

But the conference’s organisers at Beihang University have been allowed to get away with a “One World, One Web” theme that’s plainly disingenuous. I, for one, would have hoped W3C could have forced them to change it.

Any suggestions for more accurate theme for the conference?

Paul Marks, technology correspondent

Image: brionv

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