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”.
They kind of fix this in the lede, but dude did not invent the internet, he invented the World Wide Web. The internet is a superset of a whole bunch of things that includes the World Wide Web, but dude wasn’t out there inventing TCP/IP and routers and whatnot.
Nowhere does it say he calls himself the creator. I’d be looking at the media for labelling him that.
They’re replying to the article title, which was incorrect but has now been fixed.
You’re thinking of the ARPANET. When people think of the Internet. They think of the network that Gore pushed hard to open to the public. And the interface Lee designed. Gopher is having a small resurgence, and Gemini exists. But effectively what the average person sees as the Internet is their child philosophically.
I mean as a techy you aren’t wrong. There’s a lot of underlying things and technologies that sort of glosses over. But to the layperson at large we’re just pedantically nitpicking.
“Technically correct” is the best kind of correct.
Indeed
It’s really not though. Except in that one case.
I dont think so.
Saying Lee invented the web, to the lay person, implies that he invented the web we have in 2026. As though he was the grand architect of the platform we use today.
Yes, in the 80s he was a pioneer in digital communication specifications. However, I dont think many of the relevant skills are transferable to addressing the capitalist motives and ethical deficiencies which have infected the web in the interceding 40 years.
It feels a bit like asking an actor their opinion on politics.
People say wifi when they mean the Internet, somehow one cannot expect accuracy. Articles always get written by professional clueless people also.
I read “professionally clueless people” ah journalists
And the “World Wide Web” mostly means HTML - “hypertext” documents which can be published on the internet, and which are regular documents but with embedded links to other documents (hyperlinks), and a vision to ultimately create the “semantic web” - human-readable text which can also be processed by computers.
To be exact, Tim Berners Lee invented the original HTML specification, the HTTP communication protocol, and a proof-of-concept browser that implements both of them. These three things were required - on top of TCP, IP, Ethernets, that already existed - to build the Web.
The original hypertext proposal was even more complex than what we ended up getting, connecting ideas both ways.
You supported DRM dude. Self critique, renounce your mistakes, and if you really want to go after ICANN, give me a call.
For those that don’t know, he ultimately backed EME which was dumb.
I’d give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.
Back before it was corporatized, monetized and before all the gardens started building their walls.
that internet still exists and it works a lot better than back then
you’re just not using it
Yeah, a lot of rose colored glasses. I’d rather not have to give up BitTorrent thank you very much
God yes. Back in 1995, the web felt like a little village. You knew everyone in your particular digital neighbourhood so to speak. Lots of great forums, lots of little niche websites… nothing was really commercialised yet:
And frankly, I liked that it was a nerdy thing as well. Everyone shared at least some level of knowledge and understanding of what the web was. And we were all some level of nerd, whether it was Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, trains, flightsim, Sci-Fi or whatever niche interest you had.
We lost all that when we made the web too accessible to the general public. We should’ve kept it to ourselves.
back when the internet was just a curiousity for weirdos and geeks.
There was no advertising
Every website was a passion project (or a mental illness coughtimecubecough)
There were no search engines. Just “internet yellowpages” that listed links to every known website.
Websites spread via word of mouth and webrings.
Websites had guest books and visitor counters.
your counter hitting 1000 was an actual big deal.
animated gifs and tables were bleeding edge technologies.
There was no advertising
Oh yes there was. Flashing banners “ONE MILLIONTH VISITOR!!!11!!1!!” that launched 1,000 popups simultaneously and installed malware if you even dared to hover your mouse over it.
No, that happened once the corporate interests began to invade the internet.
That shit didnt exist in the early days of the internet.
People need to accept that if you build your house on the king’s land, the king owns your house.
I’d give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.
No you won’t. You wouldn’t survive a day.
I grew up with that internet as well, and despite the corporatization, I vastly prefer the internet with the technological advancements made over the last 3 decades. Using an adblocker is trivial, even certain mobile browsers support uBlock Origin.
You probably don’t remember, but the early internet was filled with shitware as well. Popups would fill your screen by themselves and eat up all your memory to the point of crashing the whole PC, malware hosted on any particular shady server would straight up install itself in the background without any user input needed, dialup was hot garbage and hogged the phone line (unless your family was rich and had a dedicated line, or even D$L), and GOD FORBID your parents were technologically inept and blamed you for their PC mishaps.
that shit came in the late 90s, once the normies started getting on the internet.
My dad worked at Novell, so we had the internet in our house well before most people had it. I remember my mom telling my dad “this internet thing is just a fad”. We laugh about it now, but I was exposed to it very early on.
Ads and popups and shitware were absolutely present then, too. Maybe not as common as they got in the late 90s, but they were there.
You probably don’t remember, but the early internet was filled with shitware as well. Popups would fill your screen by themselves and eat up all your memory to the point of crashing the whole PC
And I’d suffer it all again to be able to send people the Rick Roll link that moved around your screen and popped up with the next lyrics every time you tried to close it.
Ok, you win that one.
The fact that no one is challenging “internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee” is making me want to blow up my desktop
Sadly most people don’t understand the difference between www and the internet.
Yeah but I kind of expected The Guardian to…
Yeah, I thought it was Al Gore
Al Gore invented trucks in tubes.
I came here to post this, everyone knows Al Gore invented the internet.
It doesn’t matter how noble your intent when inventing or researching, once business has control of something, it is used to gain power and control over people. All you scientists and engineers and researchers need to starts accepting your own contribution to this monster, held accountable for the technologies you help businesses unleash on all of us.
We do not blame Prometheus for what the arsonist did.
Zeus did…
If Prometheus saw a dude twitching his fingers, eager to burn shit down and then handed him fire, he damn well should be blamed.
I think your coming on a little heavy, if you are trying to say that inventors should build systems that are resilient to misuse, I whole heartadly agree. But how your post seems it would imply that no one should be inventing anything that could possibly be corrupted or face the consequences, which is quite a huge pendulum swing that wouldn’t cause the outcome I think you are looking for.
They should consider to not build at all if it’s clear the result is business returning us to slavery.
Maybe the problem isn’t the technology in this case but a system that promotes consolidation of power and money as its top and only priority.
It’s likely impossible to pick a link in this web of causation and blame it. Not a single part is impactful enough to change things, which is why most of us do nothing, feeling impotent in our tiny place in things. But some people have a much greater impact than most of us, and scientists and engineers are some of those people. Some of those people can prevent futures simply by not inventing it.
It would be nice to be able to unlock the truths of existence without worry someone would use it to cause harm, or chase power, but that doesn’t seem like the world we have. We know people will try with whatever new thing we learn or create. Where does the responsibility lie then for those who bring that new thing into existence, knowing it may be used to cause harm? We know Shell and BP and Nestle and Elon and Phillip Morris and United Health all cause harm in pursuit of power and use science and technology to enable their ambitions. Every new insight, every new technology further empowers the worst of us to do the worst to us and it seems to me like that isn’t going to be stopping in my lifetime. That was made possible by the consolidation of private wealth and control over collective resources capitalism enables, the technology of the corporation enabled.
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.
Their complicity is more impactful. They Empower those businesses with new technological capabilities that the public, the state and the population in general is in no position to effectively keep up with and defense against. Employees also have their own responsibility, but the empowerment engineers and scientists are giving businesses by building fucking AI is very different than what an office bureaucrat contributes by managing the logistics. Logistics can only manage what exists, science and engineers are bringing new shit into existence and handing it to psychopaths. I rarely ever hear anything about the responsibility scientists and engineers have by empowering these corporations and other ambitious people even though their contributions make it possible at all.
All these LLM engineers building the spy tools and data collection and analysis systems that will be used on us need to be brought into the conversation when we discuss whose responsible for MAGA and Trump and the technofascism that were watching be built right now. They can’t do it without those inventions and discoveries, so maybe stop fucking helping them? We’re responsible for what we do, not what others are doing. That goes for scientists and engineers as much as anyone else, yet are rarely mentioned.
That’s a good point, and I feel that way about things like weapons manufacture or intelligence, and yeah, probably working for Google or Palantir. There is a limit to the abrogation of our responsibility because we need to make a living. But I still somewhat disagree with some of your point, on practical grounds, which is basically that “AI” doesn’t really work.
AI is just an example of technology that empowers, pick any technology or any scientific discovery from TNT to CRISPR. The point is that new powers are being created and handed to psychopaths who are hurting all of us. At what point are these people held to account for handing billionaires the tools they use to herd us off a cliff?
The internet isn’t broken… Humanity is.
It’s always the fucking DNS. .__.
“The internet” should just be dumb pipes that transport bits. Period.
A series of tubes, if you will. Not a big truck.
Fun fact: Sneakernet has far higher bandwidth than any physical network connection. Latency suffers horrendously, but it’s not important in most cases involving such.
The article site itself is a good example of what’s wrong with the internet.
The guardian used a “pay or ok” model for cookie acceptance.
Archive link to avoid that nonsense: https://archive.ph/pHNdt
the search providers (especially that famously ‘not evil’ one) had a huge hand in centralising and then gatekeeping access to ‘the web’. They have such a disproportionately powerful effect on how users discover content, and huge power to drive self-fulfilling ‘network effects’ where people go where people already are, which has become so normalised that most people couldn’t imagine ‘the web’ without them.
i’m not suggesting it was ever realistic or possible, but what we needed was for that one search provider and indexer of content to be broken up, partially nationalised, and partially integrated into the network specification itself. Only they are powerful enough to become a model for how to functionally disentangle their operations into public and private parts.
the only alternative is to break the centralisation of the web as china is doing and other BRICS nations intend to do, by creating ‘national internets’ which in some ways federate together and in other ways do not. I don’t like this model of development for the future of the internet but the security considerations of the present require this kind of approach.
So I was tuning into
this guyanother person testifying to Congress the other day by the name of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. Supposed neuroscientist, etc. Testifying to the effects of digital learning, pads, etc.Something just rubbed me the wrong way about him. Especially when you see the likes of Ted Cruz talking him up.
Dude is heavily pushed by Moms for Liberty and “The Free Press” which we all know is a right-wing propaganda wing that gave us none other than Bari Weiss.
I think the play here may be that they want to isolate children from the broader world and being exposed to other viewpoints. My gut instinct is that they’re trying to construct the framework to justify isolationism and promote a Christo-Fascist society.
I say this as someone who thanks the internet (especially in earlier decades) for changing multiple generations of my family from rural conservative Republican to progressive-left. The same reason they attack publicly-funded news like NPR or PBS, or Big Bird and Mr. Rogers.
These things teach critical-thinking and kindness and make fearmongering less effective.
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.
You should check out his new js project
He didn’t invent the internet.
Yeah, that was Al Gore!
Note that what Gore said was that he “took the initiative to create the Internet”. That’s actually true; his lobby work for a civilian network were one of the most significant factors in commercializing ARPANET. He never claimed that he invented the thing.
Quite true.
He never said he did in the article. Instead check on media for saying it.
I have a simple fix but that which is difficult by virtue of momentum of the people. Don’t visit corporate websites. Avoid google, microsoft, meta, reddit, youtube. Its much more difficult to avoid: whatsapp and maybe messenger if your family is on it. I would argue for photos and online drive, proton is good but i guess the CEO is trying to become/has become a tech bro like the others. so you have to figure out if alternatives like immich (self hosting) or other hosting providers are not fascist.
We should talk about these alternatives all the time to get them into everyday lingo such that people recommend those to others.
Sadly most people’s eyes glaze over if I mention it, so I don’t get too far. But I try!
Aside from the nonprofit makerspace that I’m a part of, which is filled with like-minded nerds, I’ve met ONE single person randomly in real life that wanted to learn more about self hosting. Sent him a brain dump of all the various services I run, topics for him to research, etc.
If you have any highly-specific questions, especially about niche hobbies, it’s hard to avoid Reddit. For example, there’s no (useful) equivalent to r/mechanicadvice or r/airbrush on Lemmy yet. Forums often provide alternatives, but not always.
Meta I personally don’t need at all, but I’ve managed to convince exactly zero of my irl friends to switch to, or even join, Pixelfed, which is the main alternative to Instagram. It’s a little lonely using social media when you don’t know a single person there lol. I can use it to meet people, but I prefer to have both.
Google can also be hard to avoid tbh. Other search providers just don’t compete in my experience - people frequently name DuckDuckGo but it’s just bad compared to Google in so many instances. I have DuckDuckGo set as my default browser, but I constantly end up going to Google’s site manually anyway because DuckDuckGo gives subpar search results. Presearch is usually okay I guess.
I don’t say any of that to be discouraging, but just to be realistic about the issues so they can be overcome and the alternative options can be true, full-fledged alternatives instead of compromises for the sake of morality. I think Lemmy and Mastodon in particular are doing a good job of developing into full-fledged alternatives.
…and all the streaming services are super easy to avoid 🏴☠️🦜
Can we change the title to web inventor? I am guilty of using them interchangeably as well, but he did not invent the internet. And I used the internet before the web existed lol.
Yes PLEASE! The Internet is so, so much more than the Web, it existed before it and it will exist long after the Web has been gone.
The INTERNET as a whole also has still many places that are still healthy and far away from enshittification.
Wouldn’t really help IMO. To most people (even here), “web” = “internet”.
It’s a shockingly (and relatively) small amount of people who understand that WWW ≠ TCP/IP.
