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”.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    103·
    10 hours ago

    WWW has been a complete crapshow ever since it started simply because it became popular.

    It was designed to serve documents over the internet, except everyone co-opted for their own needs like websites, APIs, etc.

    That left us with broken as hell crap at every layer from the joke that is HTML/CSS, the clownshow that is HTTP, and the circus that is JavaScript.

    And don’t even get the started on the mountain of vulnerabilities being stupid obvious crap that wouldn’t dare to fly in even basic GNU utilities at the time.

    Adding insult to injury, this guy hasn’t even provided a valid solution to this mess like hyphanet or the very newly released freenet.

    Which by the way tries to hack cheat the system with WebAssembly so that it doesn’t have to deal with HTTPS directly since its an exclusive client server protocol.