Tim Berners-Lee Update On The Web
Discover how the web has changed in the eyes of Tim Berners-Lee since its inception in 1989.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s already been nearly three decades since the internet was invented. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee made a proposal for what was ultimately a management information system. Later that same year, he went on to facilitate the first dialogue between HTTP client and server via the internet. And before Berners-Lee’s eyes, the world began to change.
A Knight in Shining HTML
Despite the massive contribution he made to humanity, Berners-Lee is still revered today for his humble and committed approach to making sure the internet remains a productive and progressive place. Instead of amassing wealth and an impressive investment portfolio like many tech titans, he maintains the non-profit group the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – which is devoted to setting technical standards for the web and protecting it from capital corruption and market forces.
At the time he started W3C, Lee hoped the internet would serve as an “open platform to allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries.” In many ways this version has stood the test of time. Millions of gigabytes of information are shared everyday online, and distributed communication has opened up possibilities for people all over the world.
Not So Happily Ever After…
However, it would be untrue to state that Berners-Lee’s vision has not been corrupted. Recently, on the web’s 28th birthday, Berners Lee wrote in the Guardian what he saw as the major shortcomings of the web as it exists today. His hope is that we can reform the web from its current form to bring it closer to the progressive vision he initially proposed.
Below are the three main areas he suggested addressing in that piece, as well as some analysis:
Data Ownership
“As our data is then held in proprietary silos, out of sight to us, we lose out on the benefits we could realise if we had direct control over this data and chose when and with whom to share it.”
Berners-Lee notes that many of us are used to the transaction of using websites for free in exchange for our data. While that’s sometimes a fair trade, Berners-Lee notes that the all-or-nothing nature of Terms and Conditions almost always favors the website, not the user, and that the creep of this data from private companies to governments is becoming all too familiar. Putting data autonomy back into the hands of users is key, Berners Lee says, to overhauling the web.
Spread of False Information
“Websites show us content they think we’ll click on – meaning that misinformation, or fake news, which is surprising, shocking or designed to appeal to our biases, can spread like wildfire.”
The problem of fake news and false information, amplified by social media, seems to have skyrocketed in the past 18 months. As Berners-Lee notes, ranking information on its salience and not its veracity is the problem. The hive mind will always favor what’s most shocking, and until we remove the compelling commercial gain from links that get the most clicks, the problem will persist. Berners Lee notes that we must work with the so-called gatekeepers of information, Facebook and Google. Their role must be to rectify these problems. However it might be difficult to prevent them having the power to decide what’s “true.”
Dishonest Political Advertising
“Political advertising online has rapidly become a sophisticated industry. The fact that most people get their information from just a few platforms and the increasing sophistication of algorithms drawing upon rich pools of personal data mean that political campaigns are now building individual adverts targeted directly at users …Targeted [political] advertising allows a campaign to say completely different, possibly conflicting things to different groups.”
Berners-Lee notes the way internet advertising is being used in political campaigns is subverting the democratic process altogether. He calls for a kind of “algorithmic transparency” that prevents candidates from targeting different ads to different people, without any broader consistency.
While each of these areas are easy to diagnose, they are hard to change. The advice from Berners-Lee might spark discussion but what about transformation? It’s likely the dissemination of information will have to lie at the individual reader level. What do you think?