‘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”.

  • flamingleg@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    the search providers (especially that famously ‘not evil’ one) had a huge hand in centralising and then gatekeeping access to ‘the web’. They have such a disproportionately powerful effect on how users discover content, and huge power to drive self-fulfilling ‘network effects’ where people go where people already are, which has become so normalised that most people couldn’t imagine ‘the web’ without them.

    i’m not suggesting it was ever realistic or possible, but what we needed was for that one search provider and indexer of content to be broken up, partially nationalised, and partially integrated into the network specification itself. Only they are powerful enough to become a model for how to functionally disentangle their operations into public and private parts.

    the only alternative is to break the centralisation of the web as china is doing and other BRICS nations intend to do, by creating ‘national internets’ which in some ways federate together and in other ways do not. I don’t like this model of development for the future of the internet but the security considerations of the present require this kind of approach.