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| The Guardian recently published an opinion piece by Tim Berners-Lee, and I found it interesting enough to take a closer look at here. Why I gave the world wide web away for free  My vision was based on sharing, not exploitation – and here’s why it’s still worth fighting for I'd appreciate it if we could all refrain from "Al Gore invented the internet" jokes, mmmkay? I was 34 years old when I first had the idea for the world wide web. Let's see, when I was 34, I'd invented... a couple of words, and that's about it. I relentlessly petitioned bosses at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), where I worked at the time, who initially found the idea “a little eccentric” but eventually gave in and let me work on it. Dangit, so he's the reason it took so long to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, by diverting critical resources from particle acceleration experiments. I was seized by the idea of combining two pre-existing computer technologies: the internet and hypertext, which takes an ordinary document and brings it to life by adding “links”. Yes, just to be clear, the World Wide Web (www) isn't the same thing as the internet. It's probably the bulk of the public internet now, and has been for a long time, but it's not the same thing. I believed that giving users such a simple way to navigate the internet would unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale. If you could put anything on it, then after a while, it would have everything on it. That was a bit optimistic. Or, rather, a lot optimistic. Turns out we don't want "everything" on it, and even if we did, others like keeping their secrets. But for the web to have everything on it, everyone had to be able to use it, and want to do so. This was already asking a lot. I couldn’t also ask that they pay for each search or upload they made. In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free. That’s why, in 1993, I convinced my Cern managers to donate the intellectual property of the world wide web, putting it into the public domain. We gave the web away to everyone. Who immediately started walling it off. Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers’ mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. I mean, technically, it's still "free" in that the data-harvesting sites don't charge money to use, instead funding themselves through advertising and data brokering. We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. One wonders if he left CERN on his own or they finally had enough of his "vision" and kicked him out. That information is probably on the internet, likely at Wikipedia, which is still free but I give them money every year anyway. But I'm too lazy to look it up. I'd say this was an ad for this "Solid" standard, but is it an ad if the product is free? Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path. The Web certainly is a lot less fun than it used to be. Part of the frustration with democracy in the 21st century is that governments have been too slow to meet the demands of digital citizens. Hm. Well. I see it differently: governments have meddled too much. Or rather, they've meddled in the wrong places and ignored the other wrong places. In my opinion. The Web isn't "free" in either sense of the word when it's riddled with paywalls and blocked off by geofences. It's not "free" if, in exchange for using sites at low to no cost, we give away our privacy and open ourselves to propaganda. There's more at the article, and of course he goes into AI issues as well. Still, beneficial things exist here. I think this site is one of them. Wikipedia is another; notice how everyone stopped questioning Wikipedia's accuracy when AI came along to show us what inaccuracy really looked like? Of course, there are downsides to everything. But there are also benefits. |
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