‘It’s not too late to fix it’: web inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul’ of the internet
www.theguardian.com
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”.

  • dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    email, straming, VOIP and video calling, whatever IOT or app protocol.

    Only email and VOIP are the two non-web based techs. HTTP (streaming, video calling, IOT, and app apis) is web, not internet tech. HTTP is a big piece of the internet. Nearly everything runs on HTTP.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      24 hours ago

      The actual video data is not HTTP, because how would that even work, and I was just working on an API that’s over raw TCP recently.

      Yes, it is a huge piece, though, and has a way of spreading even into places you don’t technically need it.

      • dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        21 hours ago

        why isnt an octet stream http? it absolutely works lol. web browsers only know http not some random protocol from the server

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          1·
          3 hours ago

          Obviously if it’s a web app client it’s going to load in HTTP before whatever other thing begins, but Zoom has a standalone application, and so does WhatsApp. I’m not even sure if they have web app offerings as well.

          An octet stream itself is just an octet stream - raw data. If it’s HTTP so was a teletype connection in the 70’s.