7 ms·

Why I gave the world wide web away for free

243 points by n1b0m 1y ago

usrusr 1y ago
I guess I must count myself lucky having lived through that optimism of the 1990ies. But perhaps those too young to really remember anything pre 9/11 have it easier to adapt to the state of the world today and I should therefore be envious? 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 1y ago
  "I guess I must count myself lucky having lived through that optimism of the 1990ies" 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.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    You're talking like you've already lost the fight. I currently have worldwide free and largely-uncensored communication.
- card_zero 1y ago
  It's nice if the 90s can be mythologized as a time of optimism and reaching for a better world. That was when Jamiroquai released "Virtual Insanity", and everybody was very worried about the ozone layer and homelessness. "The world's insane, while you drink champagne, and I'm livin' in black rain," to quote I think from Body Count by Body Count. But everything's relative.
  - EB-Barrington 1y ago
    [dead]
  - usrusr 1y ago
    Yeah, I was also thinking of music when I wrote that: https://youtu.be/ZTcWojwUrfk?feature=shared https://youtu.be/ZTcWojwUrfk?feature=shared Dee Lite - I Had a Dream I Was Falling Through a Hole in the Ozone Layer The one example of impeding ecological doom that humanity actually tackled by getting their shit together. Why did we succeed? Many ways to romanticize, but at the bottom of it is that it just wasn't that hard of a problem compared to the real toughies. (I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers)
    - runlaszlorun 1y ago
      > (I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers) Oh that's an interesting insight. I'd be up to hear more if you're up for sharing...
      - usrusr 1y ago
        Really not that complicated, actually: even at the best of times, it's always a struggle between ideas roughly in the corner of "a better world for everybody" (positivity!) and ideas built on some form of "us vs them" (zero sum, or worse). The latter come in different colors, they can co-opt religious concepts, the idea of community anywhere between the small scale of family all the way to the large scale of nation, or even social constructs orthogonal to those such as class. Or some combination thereof. At the best of times, it's still close enough to a tie between positivity and the others. Enter climate change: positives become a much harder sell, those can't really ignore it. But the zero sum ones (or negative sum, that difference does not really matter) remain unaffected - or in some ways even become more attractive.
Havoc 1y ago
Pretty ironic that it’s hosted on a platform with a pretty coercive consent or pay model
- for_i_in_range 1y ago
  Indeed. I got cookied by Google Ads and likely, many other platforms, while reading it.
  - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
    Maybe use private/incognito mode on those sites.
- rwmj 1y ago
  I agree 100%, but I'll note in this case it's trivial to bypass the banner by blocking scripts from sourcepoint.theguardian.com.
- skrebbel 1y ago
  I’m curious what you would rather have them do. Just put up a giant paywall like every other newspaper?
  - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
    I’m sure they have a toggle to make some articles entirely free. This should be one of them!
- kzrdude 1y ago
  How can you criticize The Guardian of all places, when they let people read their articles for free? This is puzzling to me. To me, this is an example of how someone can be very generous and people still find a way to ask for more.
  - Havoc 1y ago
    >they let people read their articles for free? This is puzzling to me. 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
FridayoLeary 1y ago
On the other hand you have bad faith actors like Sam Altman who pretends he really wants governments to regulate ai to protect people from it's potential risks. Maybe he also wants that but mainly he was trying to preserve openai advantage via regulatory capture. 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
CincinnatiMan 1y ago
Did this man really invent the World Wide Web all on his own?
- wiether 1y ago
  Did this person even read the article before commenting? > 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.
  - zx8080 1y ago
    Is the whole idea of CERN a public serve through research and innovation? If so, there was no non-public way to use the http/html research results.
  - tossandthrow 1y ago
    [flagged]
- yawpitch 1y ago
  Technically, yes. I mean it took a lot more than just TBL’s contribution to build up to what we have today — for good or ill — but the fundamental idea that is the WWW was his.
- Manfred 1y ago
  Insofar that’s possible in general. Networking, hyperlink systems, and phone books already existed.
- bena 1y ago
  The core idea is small enough. 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”.
- odo1242 1y ago
  He wrote the very first version of HTTP, the very first version of HTML, and the very first web browser, and gave them away for free (public domain)
nickdothutton 1y ago
The reality is we got the web that advertising built.
- seec 1y ago
  Exactly. Without the commercial investment and money advertising brought, the internet would still be mostly a concept and mostly useless for the vast majority of people. It would be like a convenient way to browse material, like a library connected client. It truly took off because Google figured out the hard part of making sense of the whole.
sim7c00 1y ago
the cases given for it not to be free anymore could be arguments for it actually being free, humans just dont live up to what we hoped. if there's freedoms then there are people who enjoy taking liberties. the problem is likely more the unpreparedness and unawareness of impact of new technology more than it being free to use. free to use means for anyone, including shit governments, corporations and others who dont necessarily want to get out of the thing the same as what it was intended for. 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..
- mpeg 1y ago
  It is still fundamentally free, giving your data to google or facebook is a choice, a very convenient choice but there are competing platforms for everything they provide. 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.
  - behringer 1y ago
    The internet is like a world of a few huge Megalopolises with branches out to smaller cities followed by rural communities and then thousands of miles of natural beauty and cottages dotted about. 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.
  - seec 1y ago
    But for most people without the large platforms and tooling of those megacorps the internet is mostly useless. Where would they even start without Google search? And people come to the internet to communicate and form groups, having a gazillion website fundamentally does nothing for this goal. Even today we can see the attempt at a decentralized network with things like Mastodon but it is never going to take in any meaningful manner, because the centralisation aspect is exactly what people are looking for. It's kind of the forums of old roman cities. You need one big one to be able to accept everyone, having a bunch of small ones spread out in the city is not only useless but also completely counterproductive. The only real problem with the megacorps is that they figured out better and faster than the hopeless idealists what people would actually want/need. So instead of having things that could be interoperable public utilities with a focus on standards, we have the wild west of commercial competition and monetary exploitation with ads. All of this happened/exist because the internet is a naive and lackluster protocol. Without the massive commercial investment of those companies, it would largely be useless. The reason it took off is basically only because it was free, not for real technical merit (the same thing for Linux).
abdulhaq 1y ago
The www was a fairly obvious idea that was just waiting for the right technology to power It. It would not have been possible to keep it to yourself and charge for it.
- mpeg 1y ago
  This was exactly my thought when reading the article, I understand the cult to Berners-Lee as being one of "the good ones", but I don't subscribe to the idea that, if he had not given it away, the web as we know it would not exist. 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"
  - luckylion 1y ago
    Minitel in France, Btx in Germany and undoubtedly other system already had millions of users when the WWW was "invented", and were arguably what it was the next generation of. It was quite the improvement, but yeah, the article sounds too much like "there was nothing, then I came along and now we have the WWW, so listen to me".
    - mpeg 1y ago
      Yes, that's exactly what I mean, that "walled gardens" were already thriving, so the idea that CERN could have put out yet another closed platform and would have still won the game is flawed.
      - newsereure 1y ago
        I really don't follow. If something like facebook had gotten there first, your argument is that it would eventually not have been walled off? Or that there would be copies of it eventually, free ones? Isn't it more likely that had there not been a free version in the first place, we would ONLY have walled gardens?
dSebastien 1y ago
I continue to hope that SOLID gains more traction in the future. It has great potential to enable a better future
- nrjames 1y ago
  Is SOLID a data format? Or just a server that serves different formats of data through a consistent API? I've glanced through the documentation and I'm not clear on exactly what it's doing that makes it different.
  - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    Solid is a sort of poor way of doing what it wants to do. The idea is to cleave the data from the application so that the user keeps their data and offers applications access to it. But this is a naive choice, in the same way the Internet was, perhaps! First, most data is not useful without the application that created it. One of the most ironic issues with Google Takeout is you can download data for all of your Google services but import it into almost nothing, there's a handful of nerd projects that can import some of it but most of it requires you be a programmer yourself to use. So the user really should own their data and the app needed to use it. Second, as soon as a company-hosted app can access your data it can copy it. So keeping your data separate in a pod isn't meaningfully helpful for privacy either. If you are connecting to their servers to use an app, it can be proprietary and you can't see what it does with your data, so you can assume it isn't private anymore. There are a lot of better implementations than Solid. But since Tim invented the Web, his implementation continues to get press on major news outlets even though it's a bad idea that's gotten no traction in over a decade.
    - BlueTemplar 1y ago
      Don't keep us waiting, give us examples of better implementations, please ! ;)
      - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
        I contribute to a project called Sandstorm where the app data is directly associated with apps you can install on the server. I think it has the best approach for a lot of reasons, both in terms of security and making it easy to use if you are not a developer. But almost any self-hosted app platform suitably exceeds the assurances Solid can meaningfully provide.
constantcrying 1y ago
The tragedy of all human freedom is that inevitably humans will use that freedom to cause harm. 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.
geokon 1y ago
isn't the fundamental reason we lost control of our data because of the design of the web? Domain name registration, IPv4 and NAT makes it difficult to serve your content. 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
mentalgear 1y ago
Now that we have the technology - and AI is massively amplifying what PR and propaganda have always done in manipulating public opinion - maybe it’s time to finally build Ted Nelson’s web: an interconnected graph of true accountability.
CompoundEyes 1y ago
I have optimism for (emphasis) open source LLMs and maybe it’s a counter to the things he’s concerned about now. Now we can have inexpensive device, running an open source model, offline, holding a compressed version of human knowledge (some hallucinated), that adapts to the user’s needs, is ad free, has a Wikipedia level of neutrality, no tracking of the user or blocked IPs and maybe most importantly no other people within it. Some serious contraband depending on where you are in the world and a relief maybe? The organizations that produce new ones with warped bias still will have to compete with existing models that it can be eval-ed against.
- pixxel 1y ago
  [dead]
yobbo 1y ago
He laments youtube comments and health-gadget data in silos and walled gardens, but this is entirely congruent with the original http client/server concept. 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.
- mwcz 1y ago
  I would argue that financial incentives explain the Web's walling-off, and the inverse for email. There's just not that much money to be made, comparatively, from email. But after some thought I'm coming around to your suggestion that the protocols were compatible with this outcome from the beginning. With email protocols, the messages themselves are sent from one system to another. With the web's protocols, the body of an HTTP request could be anything, or crucially it could be nothing. Walled gardens choose nothing. If email providers did the same, it wouldn't be email anymore.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  It's worth noting that the initial proposal for WWW (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html) was actually for a distributed/decentralized network, requiring no central authority/control: > CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination. As the web grew, this obviously became less and less true. But I don't think there is anything in particular in the initial ideas for WWW that locks it into a client/server model, although that's what naturally happened.
  - lioeters 1y ago
    > Non-Centralisation I imagine this term was used because it was before everything got centralized, so there was no need to "de-"centralize yet. > client/server model The original design of the WorldWideWeb application was a web browser and editor, which I think implies that anyone using it could run a server as easily as browsing other people's servers. Edit: Not totally sure, but it does seem there was an HTTP server bundled with the browser/editor. How to make a WWW server (1992) - https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Overview.html https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/... WWW Daemon user guide - https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/User/Guide.html https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/...
elondaits 1y ago
It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented. 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?
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Compuserve, Prodigy and original AOL come to mind, as places we used to hang out before WWW. Many magazines used to have an editor note with the ID on them for online forums, regarding the articles.
- pavlov 1y ago
  Before the WWW, the leading large-scale hypertext project was Xanadu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu It was decidedly non-free. The code was owned by Autodesk, and the protocol was supposed to include micro-transactions applied to all content access so that authors would always get paid.
  - 1dom 1y ago
    There were quite a few, I think. It depends who you ask as to which was the leading one. There was also Microcosm, HyperG and others. The Web was notable amongst them in avoiding money and licensing sort of stuff altogether (e.g. Xanadu made a point about micropayments for lots of content, and I think many of the others fell to the temptation of catering to cash in some way or other).
    - salawat 1y ago
      Anything with micro transactions is dead on arrival without massive disintermediation, or a revolution in the way we handle the incestuous relationship between finance, crime, and law enforcement. You can have a world where all people are capable of trivially transacting, without having anyone else say no, and consequently, financial crime is trivial, and a nigh-intractable problem to handle. Or you have the ability to enforce sanctions, anti-money laundering, and taxation laws, financial crime is at least tractable with sufficient will, and you have the perfect abusable engine of tyranny through which people can be completed ousted from society through financial lockout or micromanagement. Almost inevitably, you will not be the one with your hand on that button. Choose wisely.
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
> That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research. Agree, and I think at this point AI development should be nationalized before it's too late. Sure, it'll move forward slower, but at least we're not explicitly launching ourselves into a future where a few CEOs will basically hold the world hostage, which we're inching closer to every day.
- dbattaglia 1y ago
  It’s hard for me to imagine how the current superpowers (US,China, Russia) governments will be good stewards for AI, or really anything important. I’m not saying big tech is better but with the world heading more in the direction of autocracy and fascism it scares the hell out of me for these people to control the direction of AI.
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    Can't answer about China nor Russia, as I'm not very familiar with how their governance works, but in countries with democracy, the government is supposed to be representative of the population (which may or may not actually be the case, it's the idea at least). Contrast that with companies and corporations, where the basic idea is "Company makes money, our decisions should support that". I sure know where I'd put my eggs on who could potentially run AGI best, considering the options. But I'm also a believer in democracy, and would ever prefer autocracy by a government than autocracy run by companies. So assuming worst case (we're all be living under AGI that steers us into fascism and autocracy), I'd still rather that be under entities (supposedly) controlled by people, rather than entities under shareholders and CEOs.
    - Ylpertnodi 1y ago
      >but in countries with democracy, the government is supposed to be representative of the population (which may or may not actually be the case, it's the idea at least). That you used 'supposed [to be representative]', i can only think of Switzerland where this may be true, or at the least, fairly close.
initramfs 1y ago
36 years later, making the internet more widely available is still important to the rest of the world. While the U.S. is building and refurbishing nuclear power plants for AI datacenters, semiconductor process nodes have shrunk to the point where solar panels the size of a credit card can power an entire mobile device. A 3D printer is symbolically considered the part of 4th industrial revolution- owning the "means of production" (though maybe not the supply chain). But just as the internet decentralized telecommunications and broadcast media, renewable energy has the ability to minimize coverage gaps, much like how 5G cell towers increase range. The next step is owning the means of energy production. People are willing to pay $1100 for an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone and yet unwilling to integrate a $5 solar panel, because it is thought to be useless compared to the amount of power needed to run iOS or Android. Yet, there are other, lower power ways to send data, and an article about TCP/IP should be a reminder of that. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/attachments/2743709/4773509/TCPIP_CS40.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/a... The internet in 1988 was state of the art, and yet the protocols to develop even more autarkic computing systems have still not been optimized. https://newsteve.substack.com/p/from-telegrams-to-datagrams https://newsteve.substack.com/p/from-telegrams-to-datagrams I'm not saying he's resting on his laurels or that we shouldn't look back towards the success stories. I'm just encouraging people to wonder what a 34 year old Tim Berners-Lee would be developing today if he were adding another component to the internet. I think the answer is hardware, not software.
undebuggable 1y ago
The web was truly a hyper idea!
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
It's interesting how this was all built with open protocols and public funding.
crossroadsguy 1y ago
I heard him on a podcast recently. I wondered when the hosts will ask him about how his tech is being used to directly attack and actively destabilise his own home country (along with the rest of the world) by tech robber barons who own the biggest mouthpieces that run on his tech/idea. But that’s not what baffles me. What baffles me is it happened in a way that it handed over the almost the complete practical control of WWW, in a very consolidated way, to just one country, which isn’t even his own home country (not that it would have been any better).
- regularjack 1y ago
  He created the thing and made it free. I don't think we can ask more of him.
tolerance 1y ago
> Cern was created in the aftermath of the second world war by the UN and European governments who identified a historic, scientific turning point that required international collaboration. It is hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like Cern allowed me to. That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research. CERN’s Wikipedia page is surprisingly sparse on its history. I say that because I’m curious whether such thing like it as it’s being described here can be achieved today outside of the historical contexts that lead to efforts like CERN and DARPA (world wars, atomic bombs, etc.)
dfxm12 1y ago
This speaks to what should be the biggest concerns with AI. The world wide web is free as in speech and free as in beer. Because of this, it grew into the incredible tool it is today, equally beneficial for Apple computers, Apple records, and even a random apple orchard in Washington. If monopolized like social media networks, not only will relatively few get the benefits of AI, but we might also see AI output bend to the whim of their owners. We've already seen this a few times with grok.
regularjack 1y ago
Reading theae comments is just fucking depressing. How can you ask more of Tim Berners fucking Lee. FFS. It's not his fault that most people use the web through the lens of a few tech oligopolies. The state of the web is not his fault. This site used to recognize its heroes, not any more apparently.
andrewrn 1y ago
For an equally idealistic and improbable proposal about the future of the internet and personal data, I'd recommend Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future."
dmvjs 1y ago
sounds like you want to cherry pick the good parts from the bad but its out of your hands now kid
motbus3 1y ago
Ironically I cannot read the article because the telegraph wants me to pay.

243 points by n1b0m 1y ago

I guess I must count myself lucky having lived through that optimism of the 1990ies. But perhaps those too young to really remember anything pre 9/11 have it easier to adapt to the state of the world today and I should therefore be envious? 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 1y ago
"I guess I must count myself lucky having lived through that optimism of the 1990ies" 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.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  You're talking like you've already lost the fight. I currently have worldwide free and largely-uncensored communication.
card_zero 1y ago
It's nice if the 90s can be mythologized as a time of optimism and reaching for a better world. That was when Jamiroquai released "Virtual Insanity", and everybody was very worried about the ozone layer and homelessness. "The world's insane, while you drink champagne, and I'm livin' in black rain," to quote I think from Body Count by Body Count. But everything's relative.
- EB-Barrington 1y ago
  [dead]
- usrusr 1y ago
  Yeah, I was also thinking of music when I wrote that: https://youtu.be/ZTcWojwUrfk?feature=shared https://youtu.be/ZTcWojwUrfk?feature=shared Dee Lite - I Had a Dream I Was Falling Through a Hole in the Ozone Layer The one example of impeding ecological doom that humanity actually tackled by getting their shit together. Why did we succeed? Many ways to romanticize, but at the bottom of it is that it just wasn't that hard of a problem compared to the real toughies. (I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers)
  - runlaszlorun 1y ago
    > (I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers) Oh that's an interesting insight. I'd be up to hear more if you're up for sharing...
    - usrusr 1y ago
      Really not that complicated, actually: even at the best of times, it's always a struggle between ideas roughly in the corner of "a better world for everybody" (positivity!) and ideas built on some form of "us vs them" (zero sum, or worse). The latter come in different colors, they can co-opt religious concepts, the idea of community anywhere between the small scale of family all the way to the large scale of nation, or even social constructs orthogonal to those such as class. Or some combination thereof. At the best of times, it's still close enough to a tie between positivity and the others. Enter climate change: positives become a much harder sell, those can't really ignore it. But the zero sum ones (or negative sum, that difference does not really matter) remain unaffected - or in some ways even become more attractive.

Havoc 1y ago

Pretty ironic that it’s hosted on a platform with a pretty coercive consent or pay model

for_i_in_range 1y ago
Indeed. I got cookied by Google Ads and likely, many other platforms, while reading it.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  Maybe use private/incognito mode on those sites.
rwmj 1y ago
I agree 100%, but I'll note in this case it's trivial to bypass the banner by blocking scripts from sourcepoint.theguardian.com.
skrebbel 1y ago
I’m curious what you would rather have them do. Just put up a giant paywall like every other newspaper?
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  I’m sure they have a toggle to make some articles entirely free. This should be one of them!
kzrdude 1y ago
How can you criticize The Guardian of all places, when they let people read their articles for free? This is puzzling to me. To me, this is an example of how someone can be very generous and people still find a way to ask for more.
- Havoc 1y ago
  >they let people read their articles for free? This is puzzling to me. 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

FridayoLeary 1y ago

On the other hand you have bad faith actors like Sam Altman who pretends he really wants governments to regulate ai to protect people from it's potential risks. Maybe he also wants that but mainly he was trying to preserve openai advantage via regulatory capture. 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.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

CincinnatiMan 1y ago

Did this man really invent the World Wide Web all on his own?

wiether 1y ago
Did this person even read the article before commenting? > 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.
- zx8080 1y ago
  Is the whole idea of CERN a public serve through research and innovation? If so, there was no non-public way to use the http/html research results.
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  [flagged]
yawpitch 1y ago
Technically, yes. I mean it took a lot more than just TBL’s contribution to build up to what we have today — for good or ill — but the fundamental idea that is the WWW was his.
Manfred 1y ago
Insofar that’s possible in general. Networking, hyperlink systems, and phone books already existed.
bena 1y ago
The core idea is small enough. 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”.
odo1242 1y ago
He wrote the very first version of HTTP, the very first version of HTML, and the very first web browser, and gave them away for free (public domain)

nickdothutton 1y ago

The reality is we got the web that advertising built.

seec 1y ago
Exactly. Without the commercial investment and money advertising brought, the internet would still be mostly a concept and mostly useless for the vast majority of people. It would be like a convenient way to browse material, like a library connected client. It truly took off because Google figured out the hard part of making sense of the whole.

sim7c00 1y ago

the cases given for it not to be free anymore could be arguments for it actually being free, humans just dont live up to what we hoped. if there's freedoms then there are people who enjoy taking liberties. the problem is likely more the unpreparedness and unawareness of impact of new technology more than it being free to use. free to use means for anyone, including shit governments, corporations and others who dont necessarily want to get out of the thing the same as what it was intended for. 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..

mpeg 1y ago
It is still fundamentally free, giving your data to google or facebook is a choice, a very convenient choice but there are competing platforms for everything they provide. 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.
- behringer 1y ago
  The internet is like a world of a few huge Megalopolises with branches out to smaller cities followed by rural communities and then thousands of miles of natural beauty and cottages dotted about. 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.
- seec 1y ago
  But for most people without the large platforms and tooling of those megacorps the internet is mostly useless. Where would they even start without Google search? And people come to the internet to communicate and form groups, having a gazillion website fundamentally does nothing for this goal. Even today we can see the attempt at a decentralized network with things like Mastodon but it is never going to take in any meaningful manner, because the centralisation aspect is exactly what people are looking for. It's kind of the forums of old roman cities. You need one big one to be able to accept everyone, having a bunch of small ones spread out in the city is not only useless but also completely counterproductive. The only real problem with the megacorps is that they figured out better and faster than the hopeless idealists what people would actually want/need. So instead of having things that could be interoperable public utilities with a focus on standards, we have the wild west of commercial competition and monetary exploitation with ads. All of this happened/exist because the internet is a naive and lackluster protocol. Without the massive commercial investment of those companies, it would largely be useless. The reason it took off is basically only because it was free, not for real technical merit (the same thing for Linux).

abdulhaq 1y ago

The www was a fairly obvious idea that was just waiting for the right technology to power It. It would not have been possible to keep it to yourself and charge for it.

mpeg 1y ago
This was exactly my thought when reading the article, I understand the cult to Berners-Lee as being one of "the good ones", but I don't subscribe to the idea that, if he had not given it away, the web as we know it would not exist. 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"
- luckylion 1y ago
  Minitel in France, Btx in Germany and undoubtedly other system already had millions of users when the WWW was "invented", and were arguably what it was the next generation of. It was quite the improvement, but yeah, the article sounds too much like "there was nothing, then I came along and now we have the WWW, so listen to me".
  - mpeg 1y ago
    Yes, that's exactly what I mean, that "walled gardens" were already thriving, so the idea that CERN could have put out yet another closed platform and would have still won the game is flawed.
    - newsereure 1y ago
      I really don't follow. If something like facebook had gotten there first, your argument is that it would eventually not have been walled off? Or that there would be copies of it eventually, free ones? Isn't it more likely that had there not been a free version in the first place, we would ONLY have walled gardens?

dSebastien 1y ago

I continue to hope that SOLID gains more traction in the future. It has great potential to enable a better future

nrjames 1y ago
Is SOLID a data format? Or just a server that serves different formats of data through a consistent API? I've glanced through the documentation and I'm not clear on exactly what it's doing that makes it different.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  Solid is a sort of poor way of doing what it wants to do. The idea is to cleave the data from the application so that the user keeps their data and offers applications access to it. But this is a naive choice, in the same way the Internet was, perhaps! First, most data is not useful without the application that created it. One of the most ironic issues with Google Takeout is you can download data for all of your Google services but import it into almost nothing, there's a handful of nerd projects that can import some of it but most of it requires you be a programmer yourself to use. So the user really should own their data and the app needed to use it. Second, as soon as a company-hosted app can access your data it can copy it. So keeping your data separate in a pod isn't meaningfully helpful for privacy either. If you are connecting to their servers to use an app, it can be proprietary and you can't see what it does with your data, so you can assume it isn't private anymore. There are a lot of better implementations than Solid. But since Tim invented the Web, his implementation continues to get press on major news outlets even though it's a bad idea that's gotten no traction in over a decade.
  - BlueTemplar 1y ago
    Don't keep us waiting, give us examples of better implementations, please ! ;)
    - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
      I contribute to a project called Sandstorm where the app data is directly associated with apps you can install on the server. I think it has the best approach for a lot of reasons, both in terms of security and making it easy to use if you are not a developer. But almost any self-hosted app platform suitably exceeds the assurances Solid can meaningfully provide.

constantcrying 1y ago

The tragedy of all human freedom is that inevitably humans will use that freedom to cause harm. 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.

geokon 1y ago

isn't the fundamental reason we lost control of our data because of the design of the web? Domain name registration, IPv4 and NAT makes it difficult to serve your content. 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

mentalgear 1y ago

Now that we have the technology - and AI is massively amplifying what PR and propaganda have always done in manipulating public opinion - maybe it’s time to finally build Ted Nelson’s web: an interconnected graph of true accountability.

CompoundEyes 1y ago

I have optimism for (emphasis) open source LLMs and maybe it’s a counter to the things he’s concerned about now. Now we can have inexpensive device, running an open source model, offline, holding a compressed version of human knowledge (some hallucinated), that adapts to the user’s needs, is ad free, has a Wikipedia level of neutrality, no tracking of the user or blocked IPs and maybe most importantly no other people within it. Some serious contraband depending on where you are in the world and a relief maybe? The organizations that produce new ones with warped bias still will have to compete with existing models that it can be eval-ed against.

pixxel 1y ago
[dead]

yobbo 1y ago

He laments youtube comments and health-gadget data in silos and walled gardens, but this is entirely congruent with the original http client/server concept. 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.

mwcz 1y ago
I would argue that financial incentives explain the Web's walling-off, and the inverse for email. There's just not that much money to be made, comparatively, from email. But after some thought I'm coming around to your suggestion that the protocols were compatible with this outcome from the beginning. With email protocols, the messages themselves are sent from one system to another. With the web's protocols, the body of an HTTP request could be anything, or crucially it could be nothing. Walled gardens choose nothing. If email providers did the same, it wouldn't be email anymore.
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
It's worth noting that the initial proposal for WWW (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html) was actually for a distributed/decentralized network, requiring no central authority/control: > CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination. As the web grew, this obviously became less and less true. But I don't think there is anything in particular in the initial ideas for WWW that locks it into a client/server model, although that's what naturally happened.
- lioeters 1y ago
  > Non-Centralisation I imagine this term was used because it was before everything got centralized, so there was no need to "de-"centralize yet. > client/server model The original design of the WorldWideWeb application was a web browser and editor, which I think implies that anyone using it could run a server as easily as browsing other people's servers. Edit: Not totally sure, but it does seem there was an HTTP server bundled with the browser/editor. How to make a WWW server (1992) - https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Overview.html https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/... WWW Daemon user guide - https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/User/Guide.html https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/...

elondaits 1y ago

It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented. 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?

pjmlp 1y ago
Compuserve, Prodigy and original AOL come to mind, as places we used to hang out before WWW. Many magazines used to have an editor note with the ID on them for online forums, regarding the articles.
pavlov 1y ago
Before the WWW, the leading large-scale hypertext project was Xanadu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu It was decidedly non-free. The code was owned by Autodesk, and the protocol was supposed to include micro-transactions applied to all content access so that authors would always get paid.
- 1dom 1y ago
  There were quite a few, I think. It depends who you ask as to which was the leading one. There was also Microcosm, HyperG and others. The Web was notable amongst them in avoiding money and licensing sort of stuff altogether (e.g. Xanadu made a point about micropayments for lots of content, and I think many of the others fell to the temptation of catering to cash in some way or other).
  - salawat 1y ago
    Anything with micro transactions is dead on arrival without massive disintermediation, or a revolution in the way we handle the incestuous relationship between finance, crime, and law enforcement. You can have a world where all people are capable of trivially transacting, without having anyone else say no, and consequently, financial crime is trivial, and a nigh-intractable problem to handle. Or you have the ability to enforce sanctions, anti-money laundering, and taxation laws, financial crime is at least tractable with sufficient will, and you have the perfect abusable engine of tyranny through which people can be completed ousted from society through financial lockout or micromanagement. Almost inevitably, you will not be the one with your hand on that button. Choose wisely.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

> That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research. Agree, and I think at this point AI development should be nationalized before it's too late. Sure, it'll move forward slower, but at least we're not explicitly launching ourselves into a future where a few CEOs will basically hold the world hostage, which we're inching closer to every day.

dbattaglia 1y ago
It’s hard for me to imagine how the current superpowers (US,China, Russia) governments will be good stewards for AI, or really anything important. I’m not saying big tech is better but with the world heading more in the direction of autocracy and fascism it scares the hell out of me for these people to control the direction of AI.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  Can't answer about China nor Russia, as I'm not very familiar with how their governance works, but in countries with democracy, the government is supposed to be representative of the population (which may or may not actually be the case, it's the idea at least). Contrast that with companies and corporations, where the basic idea is "Company makes money, our decisions should support that". I sure know where I'd put my eggs on who could potentially run AGI best, considering the options. But I'm also a believer in democracy, and would ever prefer autocracy by a government than autocracy run by companies. So assuming worst case (we're all be living under AGI that steers us into fascism and autocracy), I'd still rather that be under entities (supposedly) controlled by people, rather than entities under shareholders and CEOs.
  - Ylpertnodi 1y ago
    >but in countries with democracy, the government is supposed to be representative of the population (which may or may not actually be the case, it's the idea at least). That you used 'supposed [to be representative]', i can only think of Switzerland where this may be true, or at the least, fairly close.

initramfs 1y ago

36 years later, making the internet more widely available is still important to the rest of the world. While the U.S. is building and refurbishing nuclear power plants for AI datacenters, semiconductor process nodes have shrunk to the point where solar panels the size of a credit card can power an entire mobile device. A 3D printer is symbolically considered the part of 4th industrial revolution- owning the "means of production" (though maybe not the supply chain). But just as the internet decentralized telecommunications and broadcast media, renewable energy has the ability to minimize coverage gaps, much like how 5G cell towers increase range. The next step is owning the means of energy production. People are willing to pay $1100 for an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone and yet unwilling to integrate a $5 solar panel, because it is thought to be useless compared to the amount of power needed to run iOS or Android. Yet, there are other, lower power ways to send data, and an article about TCP/IP should be a reminder of that. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/attachments/2743709/4773509/TCPIP_CS40.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/a... The internet in 1988 was state of the art, and yet the protocols to develop even more autarkic computing systems have still not been optimized. https://newsteve.substack.com/p/from-telegrams-to-datagrams https://newsteve.substack.com/p/from-telegrams-to-datagrams I'm not saying he's resting on his laurels or that we shouldn't look back towards the success stories. I'm just encouraging people to wonder what a 34 year old Tim Berners-Lee would be developing today if he were adding another component to the internet. I think the answer is hardware, not software.

undebuggable 1y ago

The web was truly a hyper idea!

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

It's interesting how this was all built with open protocols and public funding.

crossroadsguy 1y ago

I heard him on a podcast recently. I wondered when the hosts will ask him about how his tech is being used to directly attack and actively destabilise his own home country (along with the rest of the world) by tech robber barons who own the biggest mouthpieces that run on his tech/idea. But that’s not what baffles me. What baffles me is it happened in a way that it handed over the almost the complete practical control of WWW, in a very consolidated way, to just one country, which isn’t even his own home country (not that it would have been any better).

regularjack 1y ago
He created the thing and made it free. I don't think we can ask more of him.

tolerance 1y ago

> Cern was created in the aftermath of the second world war by the UN and European governments who identified a historic, scientific turning point that required international collaboration. It is hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like Cern allowed me to. That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research. CERN’s Wikipedia page is surprisingly sparse on its history. I say that because I’m curious whether such thing like it as it’s being described here can be achieved today outside of the historical contexts that lead to efforts like CERN and DARPA (world wars, atomic bombs, etc.)

dfxm12 1y ago

This speaks to what should be the biggest concerns with AI. The world wide web is free as in speech and free as in beer. Because of this, it grew into the incredible tool it is today, equally beneficial for Apple computers, Apple records, and even a random apple orchard in Washington. If monopolized like social media networks, not only will relatively few get the benefits of AI, but we might also see AI output bend to the whim of their owners. We've already seen this a few times with grok.

regularjack 1y ago

Reading theae comments is just fucking depressing. How can you ask more of Tim Berners fucking Lee. FFS. It's not his fault that most people use the web through the lens of a few tech oligopolies. The state of the web is not his fault. This site used to recognize its heroes, not any more apparently.

andrewrn 1y ago

For an equally idealistic and improbable proposal about the future of the internet and personal data, I'd recommend Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future."

dmvjs 1y ago

sounds like you want to cherry pick the good parts from the bad but its out of your hands now kid

motbus3 1y ago

Ironically I cannot read the article because the telegraph wants me to pay.