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”.
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What the fuck are you on about? How do you get from “I wanted it to be free and accessible. I hate that it was seized by corrupt capitalists. I want to take it back and make it for everyone again.” to “You wanted to enrich the corrupt capitalists. You succeeded in that. Enjoy it”?
He’s literally saying “this is shit, let’s change it”. That’s the opposite of enjoying it. That’s trying to get rid of ot.
Sounds like Tim needs to read theory
Hey nonprofiter, why do I still require your permission to address my anime website on my Japanese connection? What is the “public interest” in his view of “like-minded activists”?
Connect point A to B.
I know he didn’t design the web with the blind in mind.
I know he didn’t design the web with the silenced in mind. (btw, a mod proved my point here so perfectly)
I know he didn’t he design the web with kilobytes in mind. (1989 storage prices yikes!)
&btw, where is Tim’s OpenNic TLD?
If you want Domain Names to be unique, you need some organ to coordinate that. Doesn’t have to be about permission, but if I use the same name as someone else, the URI is no longer U and loses all value.
That doesn’t have to be about permission. Ideally, any unclaimed domain could be claimed by anyone (with a possible exception for things like important government domains). You’d just need some organisation to keep a registry and mediate disputes when someone tries to claim that your domain is theirs and they’d like to have it redirect to their site.
I can’t read their minds and haven’tread his book, but I’d say the rest makes it sound like they want to democratise it and harden it against corporate control. Why, do you have any indication to the contrary or are you just throwing accusations?
Isn’t that basically an implementation issue? Like, sure, text isn’t ideal for people who can’t read, but that hardly precludes using it to encode information that some other tools could turn into non-visual formats, nor does it prevent the development of other protocols designed for different content forms than text, as I’m sure you’re aware.
I know I had to learn a whole course about web content accessibility guidelines to make it as easy as possible for people with cognitive, visual or motoric impairments to navigate and use websites, including accommodation for tools like screen readers, making sure table columns and headers are unambiguously associated (even with things like floating headers when you scroll).
It’s not like the medium is actively hostile to blind people. It’s just that a discrete data storage and transmission formats lend themselves well to discrete information like symbols. I don’t know what more you would have expected of him.
Again, I’m not sure that’s an issue on part of the Web. Yes, HTTP by itself has no encryption (which HTTPS added later) or obfuscation of sender and recipient (which is a routing issue, not a content one), and DNS isn’t immune to censorship by providers selectively refusing to resolve certain domains they want to see blocked. At some level, there will always be the human factor.
But you’re just sounding like “He didn’t perfectly account for everything, so he’s an elitist fuck who hates freedom”. By that metric, literally every human is a piece of shit, because none of us are perfect, which makes it a useless metric.
Okay now you’re taking the piss.
Idk, how should I know? But also, why would he need one? Is using one particular service a requirement for championing its cause? Should he have one just to show it off?
Or should he, you know, spend his time and energy trying to raise awareness and devising a way to unfuck things, however and whyever it got fucked up?
Or is he nor pure enough?
Sounds like Tim needs to read theory
Comrade!🫂🫂
I’m missing your point, what do you think “like-minded activists” means in this context?
Let’s see yours.
I for one do not want like-minded individuals in any settings. I like diverse perspectives, unlikely thoughts, out of this quo activities, revolutionary ideas, xeno fora, etc. The weirder the better.
Does Tim praxis anything of the above?
Dude…
He could have patented what he made. He choose to put the good of everyone over himself. He has some pretty radical ideas about information being accessible and free.
He is saying the classist fucks as you call them took the domain system and privatized it for profit and control.
If anything he is saying let the diversity of opinion and thought matter, let the power to publish be in the hands of everyone.
For his clique. Are the blind part of it? Are the slaves part it, are the illiterate part of it? He most certainty wasn’t the innovator of free press. But he sure didn’t keep accessible to the silenced.
Who do you THINK WAS PART OF THAT PROCESS‽ The disabled, the poor, and the oppressed‽ What strange minded individuals would even conceptualize the hierarchical administration of addressing‽
And how do you achieve this? In the jungle, in a zoo, in a computer lab with academically groomed scientists? Please explain how you actually diversify opinions, provoke thoughts, and arm people the powers to publish freely. Do I have to bring my clean room uniform too⸮
Your link was about ICANN and DNS. This is one of the problems he is complaining about, as it’s corporate and not in the hands of the public.
Also something Berners Lee had nothing to do with, that was invented earlier.
And I said that here in my last response to you.
Maybe you should ask some questions, nicely, instead of going off like a raving lunatic when you don’t know what you are talking about.
Who is ICANN comprised off?🙃
Are you just stupid? You called a person names and then had a rant because they don’t like who ICANN is comprised of.
What the hell, how dumb are you?
now you have to show me how you guys edit your posts without the edit symbol.
2nd I’ve seen this behavior, I thought it was moderator abuse.
Are you asking this as yourself, or you finally see which like-minded activists succeeded his ethos?
I didn’t have a point. Your post made no sense to me!
Do you think the people who build the web should be like-minded with you about diversity? I think everybody in this thread agrees that the web should work with screen readers; do you think other opinions are valid?
Did it make sense later?
No. But if this is the case, then the consequences is what we are living with right now.
Always. I am just laughing my opinion required to be censored 🧵, which proved my point.
Kinda dumb that this was censored.
QED∎