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”.
I would make a somewhat controversial case that one of the main ruiners of the internet and our entire social contract has been the “free with marketing” model that replaced subscriptions.
If we’re going to live in a goods/services/money climate, I’m fine with different companies or media distributors charging subscription fees to pay for their costs. It makes sense, it’s been a working model since the early days of the internet.
What started to become a problem is when more and more services went to “free” models. Now the revenue comes from advertisers, so that comes with a train of baggage. Now producers of content are incentivized to make everything a race to see who gets user attention first and fastest for those sweet, sweet clicks. It is the main contributing factor to public attention-span erosion and the way most people have become willfully ignorant about the outside world. Additionally, content has to be moderated and censored because we wouldn’t want to scare off the precious advertisers. It’s enough to make you want to roblox yourself in minecraft.
Imagine if Youtube broadly was a paid service. You pay premium and there’s no algorithm. No “feed based on your marketing preferences.” No 20-mile long list of AI slop videos with sensational titles to get you to click on them, because the users aren’t making money from clicks but real subscribers who want to see more of the actual content.
Same with many other huge media sites, even social media. If they weren’t beholdened to attention-spans and sensationalism, we would see far less outright propaganda and lies.
I feel like this model has ruined a lot of gaming too, and has allowed publishers to release shitty, unfinished games for free with no moderation for MMO’s and no real care or passion for making a game people want to come back to, and instead just make slop games with skins for impulse shoppers.