Three ways of making Britain brilliant at the internet

It is in within our reach for Britain to leapfrog every other nation and become the most digital, most skilled, most informed country in the world.

To do that we need a new national institution to re-shape the world of dot com for the public good. I would call this new institution DOT EVERYONE and it could be the catalyst we need to shape the world we want to live in and Britain’s role in that world.

DOT EVERYONE would be an independent organisation, given its power by government but with a strong mandate from the public. We will be the ones setting its agenda, and I think there are three areas that we should prioritise.

Firstly, improving our understanding of the internet at all levels of our society. It’s simply not ok not to understand the Internet anymore. It doesn’t matter if you’re 80 or 8, if you’re online once a year or once a minute. Understanding where the internet came from and what it can do will help you make more sense of the world.

That starts with Whitehall – we need more politicians and senior civil servants who realise that ‘getting’ digital means more than operating a twitter account or taking an iPad to meetings. And politicians of all parties need to get to grips with the idea that the internet can be a tool for transforming the relationship between the state and the citizen when it comes to public services.

At all levels of society, from citizens to CEOs, we need to get educated and informed about the internet, so we can all be involved and we can all reap the benefits.

Secondly, we must get more women involved in technology. The big Internet companies we use every day and the cultures they spawn do not reflect the diversity of their users. If you take a look at the tech sector as a whole today, just 14% of employees are female. Is this why the big tech companies haven’t addressed issues that are predominantly faced by women on social media such as trolling, harassment, death threats? The digital sector should be leading the way in our striving, as a society, to move beyond prejudice based on gender, ethnicity, sexual identity, class or disability.

For starters here’s a straightforward, achievable goal – let’s make the UK the best place to be a female technologist in the world. Britain will need 1m people to fill the jobs created in the technology sector by 2020. So let’s create an awesome new cohort of female coders, creators, designers – women to take on any and every digital role.

Thirdly, we have to tackle the genuinely new and thorny ethical and moral issues the internet has created. Right now it’s the big commercial technology platforms that are currently the dominant voices in these debates.  Google and Facebook are writing the answers because our institutions and legislators can’t cope and don’t have enough expertise. We wouldn’t make policy decisions about health care matters without consulting doctors and medical ethicists. According to the same logic, we shouldn’t make privacy and data policy without consulting technologists and encryption experts.

There is no shortage of other issues to be explored. Do children need different rights online? What are the implications of wearable technology? How should we prepare for the so called “second machine age” and the increasing robotisation of work? A new institution will make sure the UK fills the moral and ethical gap that exists at the heart of discussions about the Internet.

I want to challenge us all – leaders, legislators and users to be far more ambitious for ourselves and for the country in how we approach the Internet.

Why can’t we be the most digitally powered up people on the planet? There are massive gains for us as a society if we are.

Martha Lane Fox co-founded lastminute.com and is a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords. This article is based on Martha’s recent Richard Dimbleby Lecture. You can read the full version here.