{"id":11729,"date":"2016-06-08T06:59:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T11:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=11729"},"modified":"2024-12-05T17:45:23","modified_gmt":"2024-12-05T22:45:23","slug":"the-web-needs-fixing-says-the-man-who-invented-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2016\/06\/08\/the-web-needs-fixing-says-the-man-who-invented-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The web needs fixing, says the man who invented it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Anyway you look at it, the World Wide Web is an incredible achievement. The way that it effortlessly allows billions of Internet users from around the world to connect and accomplish things they never could have before makes it easily one of the most impressive inventions of the past century. In fact, it’s so amazing that it seems churlish to criticize it — unless you happen to be the guy who invented it in the first place, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who told me once that if anyone calls him Sir in a social setting, they have to buy a first round of drinks) did exactly that during a recent symposium on the future of the web called the Decentralized Web Summit<\/a>, which was convened in an old church in San Francisco by long-time Internet activist Brewster Kahle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The downside of the way the web has developed since it was created in 1989, Berners-Lee said<\/a>, is that the same technology that allows for incredible examples of connectivity also supports “spying, blocking sites, re-purposing people\u2019s content [and] taking you to the wrong websites,” he said, which “completely undermines the spirit of helping people create.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was\u00a0originally published\u00a0at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Kahle told the group that CIA whistle-blower Edward Snowden showed “we\u2019ve inadvertently built the world\u2019s largest surveillance network with the web.” Countries like China can “make it impossible for people there to read things, and just a few big service providers are the de facto organizers of your experience,” he said. “We have the ability to change all that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What form that change might take isn’t clear, unfortunately. Berners-Lee and Kahle, among others, are interested in the potential of block-chain technology<\/a> — the software that underlies Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies — as a way of making it easier for creators and content owners to get paid, and to keep the Internet from relying entirely on advertising as a revenue source. That is responsible for some of the web’s worst flaws, Berners-Lee said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ad revenue is the only model for too many people,” the web’s creator said. “People assume today\u2019s consumer has to make a deal with a marketing machine to get stuff for \u2018free,\u2019 even if they\u2019re horrified by what happens with their data.” But the biggest problem is a social one, he said. “The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for micro-blogging. We don\u2019t have a technology problem, we have a social problem.”<\/p>\n

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Anyway you look at it, the World Wide Web is an incredible achievement. The way that it effortlessly allows billions of Internet users from around the world to connect and accomplish things they never could have before makes it easily one of the most impressive inventions of the past century. In fact, it’s so amazing … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The web needs fixing, says the man who invented it”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fortune"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269691,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11729\/revisions\/269691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}