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”.
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.