‘It’s not too late to fix it’: web inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul’ of the internet
www.theguardian.com
Founder of the world wide web says commercialisation means the net has been ‘optimised for nastiness’, but collaboration and compassion can prevail

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.

Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.

In Australia to promote his book, This is for Everyone, Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become – and how he and a community of collaborators can put the power of the web back into the hands of its users.

Berners-Lee describes his excitement in the earliest years of the web as “uncontainable”. Approaching 40 years on, a rebellion is brewing among himself and a community of like-minded activists and developers.

“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.

Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by “charlatans”.

  • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4·
    15 hours ago

    Tons of people engage with email regularily, including through standalone MTAs.*

    But my point is that email was big before the web even grew to its current significance. So I think common people have at least that one point of contact with the internet that is quite distinct from the web in their memory.

    But maybe it’s really a generational question. I have to concede that a lot of people now use web interfaces for their email client, especially outside of corporate managed devices. Late milennials and Gen Z will have grown up with the web being more significant than email.

    * Don’t forget about the MTAs on smartphone OSes, those aren’t web based.

    – signed, a late milennial network engineer, whose dad always installed outlook on the family computers

    PS: Funny story last week I was at CERN at the CIXP, the CERN Internet Exchange Point, to upgrade a connection to 400Gb/s, and in the lobby of the building they hung up the cover pages of Tim Berners-Lee’s original Hypertext and HTTP papers