Magna Carta proves we deserve the rule of law online. No, really.

OK, OK, I know very few of you woke up this morning excited to read about an 811-year-old document written in Latin. But I promise you, it’s worth it. In today’s world of upheaval and accelerating change, looking back at how people handled previous crises can be a surprisingly useful source of ideas for our future. And if you get bored, just pretend this is being read to you by an animated Disney lion with the voice of Peter Ustinov.

King John of England, great-great-grandson of William the Conqueror (of Bayeux Tapestry fame), was famously an untrustworthy little shit. John killed people he didn’t like, overtaxed the kingdom, and lost his family’s ancestral home (Normandy in France). This pissed off the barons of England (“baron” means “rich guy with a private army”) so much that they rebelled and struck an alliance with the Mayor of London. Together, they forced John to sign a long document of concessions in 1215, at a field called Runnymede.

King John, being the untrustworthy little shit that he was, reneged on the deal and started fighting the barons again, but he quickly died of dysentery, just like in a bad run of Oregon Trail. His nine-year-old son Henry III became king and made peace by re-issuing his dead dad’s concessions voluntarily with slight modifications several times, most famously in 1225. A scribe called this document magna carta (Latin for “big charter”) to distinguish it from some shorter charters, and the name stuck.

Besides becoming a foundation of British law, about 550 years later, the Continental Congress picked up Magna Carta as part of the justification for American rights and source material for the United States Constitution. From there it influenced the French Revolution, and became a global inspiration.

The two most famous clauses, which are still part of English law today, guarantee due process and the rule of law.

The revolutionary phrase here is “law of the land.” Before this, England was usually referred to as the “kingdom” or the “realm,” which implied that the country and the king were synonymous. The only laws that could possibly exist were those set down by the king; and if he changed his mind, then the laws had to change as well. Subjects had no recourse, because resisting the will of the king was treason, and the punishment for that was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. [DO NOT FOLLOW THIS LINK if you’re eating. Even the medieval drawings are gross.]

Forcing King John to acknowledge “the law of the land” was a radical act. It meant that the country of England existed apart from the king, and that England could have laws that even the king had to obey. This is the seed of almost every right that comes later, and arguably led to the rebirth of democracy. This is not just a historical detail. Only last Thursday, the arrest of King Charles’ brother Andrew, and Charles’ public statement that “the law must take its course” (i.e., there is no Royal get-out-of-jail-free card) is a direct reflection of this phrase in Magna Carta.

I dwell on this because we need the same radical reframing to win our rights online. Online platforms should be subject to the laws of the communities they serve, not the will of their owners.

Today, company executives set all the laws (policies and terms of service), and tend to refer to the people who use their platforms patronizingly as “our community,” just as John would refer to “my kingdom.” This is false. The millions of active users of a platform are not serfs beholden to the company that operates it, and creators are not personal vassals of platform CEOs. We had friends, interests, and organizational affiliations before social media, and our online connections are deeper and more profound than any one company’s software and servers.

To modern CEOs, this probably sounds just as radical as “law of the land” did to King John back in 1215. But corporate law is not the divine right of kings. When Mark Zuckerberg incorporated TheFacebook, Inc. in 2004, the state of Delaware did not grant him absolute authority to unilaterally govern the social lives of billions of people worldwide forevermore. Our social contract with each other should be “the law of the land” online. Not the will of a c-level executive.

As important as Magna Carta was, it had almost nothing to do with democracy as we think of it today. The barons had no intention of giving their subjects a say in government. Even the rule of law was limited – by some estimates, only half of the population of England in 1215 would have qualified as a “free man.” The rest were serfs, bound to the land they worked and the baron who owned it.

[There is some scholarly debate about whether the Latin word “homo” in Magna Carta was read as including women, but lots of other evidence shows that women were still treated legally as a mere appendage of their fathers and husbands, so I’m granting medieval English monarchs zero points for gender equality.]

It took 139 years for this to open up, even a little. In 1354, John’s great-great-grandson Edward III issued an updated set of statutes that changed the clause to “man, of whatever estate or condition he may be.” And even with that modest reform, arguments about royal authority continued, and it took another 288 years for the eruption of a bloody, nine-year Civil War, a Commonwealth, and finally the Glorious Revolution in 1688 to settle Parliamentary supremacy over the king.

[And that still didn’t mean universal suffrage, which took another 240 years, until 1918 for men and 1928 for women.]

Why am I going on about this? Because big platforms are working hard to convince us, and government regulators, that they are capable of adjusting course and making improvements that avoid the need to change the fundamental structure of platform governance. History suggests that this is setting us up for a loooooooong wait for things to get only a little better.

I’m not discounting the potential for positive change along the way. After all, I just spent a month proposing a practical way to expand due process within the current system. But I don’t think that will ever be enough.

If platforms keep pushing off deeper reform with a “l’réseau social, c’est moi” attitude, they are setting themselves up for the more rapid and disruptive change of revolutions like those that overthrew tyrannical governments in the US, in France, against the Tsars in Russia, etc.

Maybe platform executives can push the reckoning off for decades or even centuries. But a reckoning is coming, sooner or later.

Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].