THE DANGERS OF FORMING A WEB MASTERS GUILD.


How the World Wide Web will always be different from other media is the access we, the people, have to it. No matter how Disneyfied the thing becomes, revolutionatries, visionaries, small business owners and plain old folk will always be able to put their messages on-line for a minimal cost. The Internet as bastion of free speach is the one thing users wouldn't ever want to compromise, right ?
Well, no.
As it happens, some of the people most responsible for the growth of the web- the web masters themselves- are now talking about setting limits on the freedom users have enjoyed so far. A group of them has created the Institute of Professional Webmasters (IPW), a seven-month-old organization based on the worrisome notion that only people who are certifiedby them will be qualified to build web pages in Canada.
The IPW, which charges $55 for a membership, announced May 7 it had pulled in $3000,000.00 in funding from private companies to help get itself going. It already has a website, and the Globe and Mail gave it a write-up last week.
According to the website, one of the IPW's most important jobs will be to "establish benchmarks and standards for professional accreditation." Now, no one can be apposed to the creation of a non profit organization that furthers the interests of a particular group. Journalists, for instance, have several associations in Canada available to them: the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, La Federation Professionnelle des Journalistes du Quebec, among others. Allthese groups have criteria for membership; none, however, has ever ventured into the dubious area of "professional accreditation.' The reason is simple: where freedom of speach is involved, you are allowed to be lousy at it.
Doctors, dentists, engineers and architects are all required to be licensed by a recognized professional body before plying their trade. You don't want unqualified people building bridges or injecting substances into your body. But even in cases where public safely is a major issue, professional bodies tend to put their members interests ahead of the public's. Here in Quebec the College des Medcines - the professional corporation that licenses doctors - is often criticized for its stubborn opposition to alternative forms of health care, such as homeopathy and midwifery. Critics say the doctors are using their muscle to keep competition at bay.
Who's to say a body that liceses web designers wouldn't be any different ? The IPW's interim president, Ed Aspinal (who runs a web-design school, by the way), was quoted in The Globe as saying he wants to protect the credibilitly of his trade by making sure incompetents aren't putting up second-rate sites for unknowing clients. He also wants his association to address the problem of webmasters who build porn sites or racist sites.
The first argument is empty, since any web designer that's any good will have a portfolio - just like freelance journalists and photographers. Incompetents can weed themselves out without the help of a licensing body.
And as for the ethical question of taste and free speach, well, this is exactly why journalists associations have so far ruled against the idea of providing "professional accreditation." Because if the IPW is to be credible as a license-giver, it has to have the same kind of sanction that the College des Medecines du Quebec has - government sanction. Do we want to give the government the tool to arrest web designers who build sites it doesn't like ? The College des Medicines is already notorious for "assisting" the police in the arrest of unlicensed researchers who develop cures that compete with conventional medicine.
If the IPW wants to be an informal body that provides a suggested curriculum for web-design schools, that's probably a good idea. But to be a licensing body implies having a restrictive level of control over taste and thought. Plus, requiring professional accreditation will just jack up the prices and only serve to protect the interests of established designers with the right contacts - to the detriment of all the burgeoning cottage web-design industry.
Is that what the web is all about ?