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”.
The article site itself is a good example of what’s wrong with the internet.
The guardian used a “pay or ok” model for cookie acceptance.
Archive link to avoid that nonsense: https://archive.ph/pHNdt
Please correct the post title: it says “internet inventor” (which is incorrect) and “soul of the web”, while the article name says “web inventor” and “soul of the internet”
OUR web
The fact that no one is challenging “internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee” is making me want to blow up my desktop
Sadly most people don’t understand the difference between www and the internet.
Yeah, I thought it was Al Gore
Al Gore invented trucks in tubes.
I have a simple fix but that which is difficult by virtue of momentum of the people. Don’t visit corporate websites. Avoid google, microsoft, meta, reddit, youtube. Its much more difficult to avoid: whatsapp and maybe messenger if your family is on it. I would argue for photos and online drive, proton is good but i guess the CEO is trying to become/has become a tech bro like the others. so you have to figure out if alternatives like immich (self hosting) or other hosting providers are not fascist.
We should talk about these alternatives all the time to get them into everyday lingo such that people recommend those to others.
Sadly most people’s eyes glaze over if I mention it, so I don’t get too far. But I try!
Aside from the nonprofit makerspace that I’m a part of, which is filled with like-minded nerds, I’ve met ONE single person randomly in real life that wanted to learn more about self hosting. Sent him a brain dump of all the various services I run, topics for him to research, etc.
AI slop and the legions of uncritical adoring emoji-filled all caps comments under every garbage video is already the end of humanity. We’re done.
Can we fix the internet? Please!I’d give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.
Back before it was corporatized, monetized and before all the gardens started building their walls.
People need to accept that if you build your house on the king’s land, the king owns your house.
that internet still exists and it works a lot better than back then
you’re just not using it
Yeah, a lot of rose colored glasses. I’d rather not have to give up BitTorrent thank you very much
God yes. Back in 1995, the web felt like a little village. You knew everyone in your particular digital neighbourhood so to speak. Lots of great forums, lots of little niche websites… nothing was really commercialised yet:
And frankly, I liked that it was a nerdy thing as well. Everyone shared at least some level of knowledge and understanding of what the web was. And we were all some level of nerd, whether it was Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, trains, flightsim, Sci-Fi or whatever niche interest you had.
We lost all that when we made the web too accessible to the general public. We should’ve kept it to ourselves.
back when the internet was just a curiousity for weirdos and geeks.
There was no advertising
Every website was a passion project (or a mental illness coughtimecubecough)
There were no search engines. Just “internet yellowpages” that listed links to every known website.
Websites spread via word of mouth and webrings.
Websites had guest books and visitor counters.
your counter hitting 1000 was an actual big deal.
animated gifs and tables were bleeding edge technologies.
I used a counter to fight a business competitor. I had built an ice cream business, and once it got successful, the landlord locked us out, installed his daughter as the manager, and stole our entire business. He knew we didn’t have the money to fight it civilly, and he had relatives on the police force, so they refused to deal with it criminally. They told all of our customers that we had sold it to them, which we had NOT.
But I still had control of the website, so I changed it to tell the entire story, with names. Every single thing I said could be backed up with documents and/or witness testimony, so I just laughed when he demanded I remove it or he’d sue me. I reminded him that it was ALL true, he knew it, and I could prove it. My primary objective at that point was to force them to stop using the name, MY company’s name.
What made my web page really powerful was the counter at the bottom. As that number rose, it meant more locals were reading it, and spreading the word. It also showed a correlation - as the number rose, their customers dropped, and their business tanked. Eventually they changed the name, but that didn’t help, and they ended up selling the business.
15 years later and I’m still in business, using the name they tried to steal. Last week I was at an event and a young woman asked if I was the same guy who used to own that ice cream shop, and she was excited to find out it was me. She went often as a kid, and missed it when I was gone. She also said they stopped going when they heard it had been stolen, and said the place that replaced mine “sucks.”
That counter was a powerful weapon in my battle.
So I was tuning into
this guyanother person testifying to Congress the other day by the name of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. Supposed neuroscientist, etc. Testifying to the effects of digital learning, pads, etc.Something just rubbed me the wrong way about him. Especially when you see the likes of Ted Cruz talking him up.
Dude is heavily pushed by Moms for Liberty and “The Free Press” which we all know is a right-wing propaganda wing that gave us none other than Bari Weiss.
I think the play here may be that they want to isolate children from the broader world and being exposed to other viewpoints. My gut instinct is that they’re trying to construct the framework to justify isolationism and promote a Christo-Fascist society.
I say this as someone who thanks the internet (especially in earlier decades) for changing multiple generations of my family from rural conservative Republican to progressive-left. The same reason they attack publicly-funded news like NPR or PBS, or Big Bird and Mr. Rogers.
These things teach critical-thinking and kindness and make fearmongering less effective.
Are you talking about Berners Lee? I’m surprised, sounds like he just wants to decentralize more
No this guy.
You might want to edit your original comment to note that
I see what you mean, my bad, corrected.
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.
Can we change the title to web inventor? I am guilty of using them interchangeably as well, but he did not invent the internet. And I used the internet before the web existed lol.
Yes PLEASE! The Internet is so, so much more than the Web, it existed before it and it will exist long after the Web has been gone.
The INTERNET as a whole also has still many places that are still healthy and far away from enshittification.
Wouldn’t really help IMO. To most people (even here), “web” = “internet”.
It’s a shockingly (and relatively) small amount of people who understand that WWW ≠ TCP/IP.
“The internet” should just be dumb pipes that transport bits. Period.
Fun fact: Sneakernet has far higher bandwidth than any physical network connection. Latency suffers horrendously, but it’s not important in most cases involving such.
A series of tubes, if you will. Not a big truck.
“The internet should be for everyone, except the people I don’t like.” - average modern internet user
Glad he’s able to call out the domain name system for the crock of shit that it is.
I don’t know, the thing about the internet is that it does bring a ton of value, and operating it does have costs in turn. Maybe Sir Tim is right about DNS being the point where it got commercial, but it was going to happen somehow. Arxiv and Wikipedia still exist, but how do you do Amazon non-commercially? Even YouTube is a challenge.
There used to be a sort of mantra that technology was neutral and people are good and bad. But actually, that’s not true of things on the web
Arguably, that’s not the distinction. Technologies can be explicitly of control or of chaos. And then that relative structure or freedom can itself be used for good or for evil.
A central platform is of control, Lemmy or Linux is of chaos. And obviously we lean towards the latter a lot, but for some things, even Lemmy wants central control and monitoring, so it’s not evil, exactly.
How you do amazon nonprofit is easy. Its already a giant planned economy, just take the profit out and make every vendor pay the cost for using it, Servers delivery etc. The workers would get payed well and the incentive from the public to support it is there, people want this convience and are willing to spend for it.
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 creators 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.
how do you do Amazon non-commercially?
Several smaller alternatives rather than one giant go-to
It’s always the fucking DNS. .__.
