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”.
I agree with the first part, but scientists and engineers are not that much more complicit than literally everyone with a job. Those businesses couldn’t have done that without marketing, hr, janitors, tradespeople, lawyers etc etc etc either. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and there is no ethical job.