Technology
The father of the world wide web is one
disappointed dad
The father of the world wide
web is one disappointed dad
Today is the World Wide Web's 29th birthday, and to
celebrate the occasion, its creator has told us how bad it's become. In an
open letter appearing in The Guardian,
Tim Berners-Lee painted a bleak picture of the current internet -- one
dominated by a handful of colossal platforms that have constricted innovation
and obliterated the rich, lopsided archipelago of blogs and small sites that
came before. It's not too late to change, Lee wrote, but to do so, we need a
dream team of business, tech, government, civil workers, academics and artists
to cooperate in building "the web we all want."
Lee reserves his biggest criticisms for the huge platforms
-- by implication, Facebook and Google, among others -- that have come to
dominate their spheres and effectively become gatekeepers. They "control
which ideas and opinions are seen and shared," Lee wrote, pointing out
that they're able to impede competition by creating barriers. "They
acquire startup challengers, buy up new innovations and hire the industry's top
talent. Add to this the competitive advantage that their user data gives them
and we can expect the next 20 years to be far less innovative than the
last."
Centralizing the web like this has lead to serious
problems, like when an Amazon Web Services outage took down a chunk of internet
services over a week ago -- ironically, nearly a year to the day after another
similar web-crippling incident on AWS. But bottlenecking the
internet through a handful of platforms has also enabled something more
sinister: The weaponization of the internet. From trending conspiracy theories all the way up to influencing American politics using hundreds
of fake social media accounts, outside actors have been able to maximize their
manipulation efforts thanks to a far more centralized internet than we used to
have, in Lee's opinion.
These companies are ill-equipped to work for social
benefit given their focus on profit -- and perhaps could use some regulation.
"The responsibility – and sometimes burden – of making these decisions
falls on companies that have been built to maximise profit more than to
maximise social good. A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social
objectives may help ease those tensions," wrote Lee.
You know who could fix the future of the internet? Us, of
course -- a group of individuals from a broad cross-section of society who can
outthink the hegemony of colossal internet corporations who are mostly fine
with things as they are. Incentives could be the key to motivating new
solutions, Lee concluded.
But there's another problem that business can't really
solve: Closing the digital gap by getting the unconnected onto the internet.
These are more likely to be female, poor, geographically remote and/or living
outside of the first world. Bringing them into the fold will diversify voices
on the internet and be, well, a moral thing to do now that the UN has decided
internet access is a basic human right. But it'll take more than inventive
business models to get them online and up to speed: We'll have to support
policies that bring the internet to them over community networks and/or public
access.
- This article originally appeared on Engadget.
