To me, this is an example of how someone can be very generous and people still find a way to ask for more.
That's the data use consent part...which the article talked about:
>We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers
>On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising.
...hence irony. Guardian is either pay or agree to data use
News shouldn’t be a luxury.
Which did you do? Let me guess.
The idea that people can expect to know the data stored about them unfortunately is a pipe dream. governments certainly have no interest in that. As a rule i assume that anything i do and write online is being recorded under my name and i act accordingly. I'm not paranoid but i am prudent. I bear in mind the possibility that one day there will be a massive leak and anyone will be able to type my name and see everything i've ever done.
> 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.
Since you are so incredibly gifted I am sure that this is obvious to you.
But for a lot of more laymen types, it might not be that straight forward.
(i am sorry you have to be in a world with so many stupid people)
And the http protocol sits on top of the stack. Routing, dns, nat, etc all do not matter to http.
HTTP is basically “this is how you send a document over the wire”.
> The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1993.
Might something else have emerged instead if CERN had said no? Who knows. Without the Web, the Internet itself might have stayed in its primarily research and academic domain. The rapid growth of the Web is in part what motivated the commercialization of the Internet and the "Information Superhighway", and then came the entrepeneurs and VCs, and well, here we are.
Could it have all happened based on Gopher instead? Who knows.
what you hope a technology will become when given away for free, and what it really becomes, thats 2 totally different things.
technology innovators should always be aware of this, and try to align the capabilities of their software to more specific and perhaps restrictive models to protect its users. rather than to give it for free and hope humans will be good with it. especially if there is an angle that will allow a single party to heavily impact its use by investments not available to others..
Governments have made every attempt to control or limit the web, but we have technologies that allow us to evade this, we have encryption, and cryptocurrency, and open source software.
Online communities of hackers still exist and thrive, way more than they did in 90s, the only difference is that the total population of the web has increased substantially, and most people choose convenience over freedom.
Parent reminds me of the city slicker in his 1 bedroom closet of a condo in one of the many sterile towers shouting how the world has been destroyed and will never be nice again.
I'm sure we can all think of cases where a core technology was kept private and eventually died in favor of an open version, the same would have happened here.
The article says it best "In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free"
Sure, eventually it could have happened but it may not have happened for several decades.
This statement reads to me to be heavily hindsight biased.
CERN wasn't exactly a place filled with idiots, yet the article even says that Tim Berners-Lee's boss thought the concept was a little eccentric and only gave in because Tim Berners-Lee fought for it.
Unless you're saying the concept is simple? In which case yes, most brilliant ideas that are hard to have are made by elegantly combining things to make a "simple" result.
The really annoying thing about those ideas is you sit there and kick yourself thinking, "that's so simple, why didn't I think of that"
There's a very different possible future where he instead went private and sold it, and I honestly have no idea how to work out how successful the web would have been in that world.
A good chunk of the web's impact is it was how easy it was to adopt, so I doubt we would have seen as much success as we do see now, as one of the bedrocks of our current ecosystem.
We might even have seen a similar situation to unix and linux, where a theoretical proprietary web that was released eventually was rewritten in an open-source format, but with lots of fragmentation of the ecosystem.
The important thing for it to succeed was to have a large enough group of people using the same standards. That was probably a (very) hard thing to accomplish, and perhaps Berners-Lee played a large role in that?
The web was given away for free and made public, but that only means that people get to decide whether they use it for good or ill purposes. To be honest, I don't get why he is lamenting this.
>You should own it. You should be empowered by it.
Why? Nothing in the design of web implies this. This is just a a value judgement (I don't disagree with), not something inherent to the technology. In fact the technology makes it a difficult problem to solve.
>That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
Which is the real point of the article. But that ship has already sailed. The US or China will never sell out it's corporations. And the EU and their member states is non-entity in the AI race.
Additionally it doesn't resolve the contradiction above. Freedom means the ability to use something for ill.
technically if you run your own server you serve your data and you own it. People can scrape and steal/copy it, but its illegal and harder to make the bigbucks (well with the AI gray area)
But I cant easily for-dummies run a software on my computer that serves my IG/Facebook-equivalent data. Furthermore all the experts told me for decades hosting is dangerous. Its bad and the hackers are going to steal my precious bodily fluids
So of course i just let Facebook/Googphabet host it and see some ads. What harm can come of that /s
i think Tor solves all of this, but i dont really know. It feels like stuff like Solid isnt necessary
The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything and arguably succeeded because it could be adapted for so many different purposes.
In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.
What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?
usrusr•1h ago
PS: Yes, this appears a terribly unrelated to the article, but that's basically what I read: "There was this trajectory to a better world, I eagerly contributed (and this turned out huge but that's beside the point), but at some point we lost direction and now I'm just trying to find small steps in that old direction, even if the impact certainly won't repeat."
weinzierl•24m ago
The hardest for me is to grasp is that world wide free and largely uncensored communication was a singular anomaly that is never going to come back.
card_zero•21m ago