‘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”.

  • Lka1988@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    3 hours ago

    I’d give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.

    No you won’t. You wouldn’t survive a day.

    I grew up with that internet as well, and despite the corporatization, I vastly prefer the internet with the technological advancements made over the last 3 decades. Using an adblocker is trivial, even certain mobile browsers support uBlock Origin.

    You probably don’t remember, but the early internet was filled with shitware as well. Popups would fill your screen by themselves and eat up all your memory to the point of crashing the whole PC, malware hosted on any particular shady server would straight up install itself in the background without any user input needed, dialup was hot garbage and hogged the phone line (unless your family was rich and had a dedicated line, or even D$L), and GOD FORBID your parents were technologically inept and blamed you for their PC mishaps.

    • 7101334@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      40 minutes ago

      You probably don’t remember, but the early internet was filled with shitware as well. Popups would fill your screen by themselves and eat up all your memory to the point of crashing the whole PC

      And I’d suffer it all again to be able to send people the Rick Roll link that moved around your screen and popped up with the next lyrics every time you tried to close it.

      • Lka1988@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        40 minutes ago

        My dad worked at Novell, so we had the internet in our house well before most people had it. I remember my mom telling my dad “this internet thing is just a fad”. We laugh about it now, but I was exposed to it very early on.

        Ads and popups and shitware were absolutely present then, too. Maybe not as common as they got in the late 90s, but they were there.