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”.
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.
Oh yes there was. Flashing banners “ONE MILLIONTH VISITOR!!!11!!1!!” that launched 1,000 popups simultaneously and installed malware if you even dared to hover your mouse over it.
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.