Jeff Jarvis has been working on a A Hippocratic oath for the internet.

He’s attending the first e-G8 summit on the internet gathered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy this week in Paris.

I. We have the right to connect.
II. We have the right to speak.
III. We have the right to assemble and to act.
IV. Privacy is an ethic of knowing.
V. Publicness is an ethic of sharing.
VI. Our institutions’ information should be public by default, secret by necessity.
VII. What is public is a public good.
VIII. All bits are created equal.
IX. The internet must stay open and distributed.

Jeff makes the point that the internet “frightens institutions of legacy power”. That’s why they keep trying to regulate and limit “using convenient masks — privacy, security, civility….”

The last one is the internet’s best protection: its own structure. To the leaders gathered in Paris, I say of that architecture: Primum non nocere. First, do no harm.

If you have no legacy power to protect, you should be fighting to keep the internet as free as possible. It’s our best hope for the future.

I signed Jeff’s recommended online petition.