I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet

by kawera • 9 years ago

49 7 9 years ago

the8472• 9 years ago

On a more technical level: We need more decentralization and adherence to the end-to-end principle

XorNot• 9 years ago

Agreed on decentralization, but the current direction on encryption is amazingly hostile to it - i.e. with no standards for defining the borders of your own network, or trust relationships, the ability to do caching sanely just goes out the window.

Which is bad for decentralization - because decentralizing really really requires an ability to offload and delegate where data is stored - it's not practical, for instance, for my phone to cache huge chunks of the web, but a server in my house that's always on (or has a more reliably available power supply) can do it.

ajdlinux• 9 years ago

As commerce has become more mechanised, we've lost the ability to bargain and haggle in consumer business relationships. Forget about sacrosanct privacy rights, I can't even choose to pay to opt out of a lot of data collection. We need better options than all-or-nothing.

chvid• 9 years ago

Political manipulation, control, misinformation and so on has been around long before the invention of the web and will be around long after we stop using the web.

Just as it did not start with Donald Trump and certainly not will end with him.

tnone• 9 years ago

That donation ad at the bottom is hilarious, in context. Sorry Guardian, but you're not getting a cent from me after all the tripe you published. Throw out all the click bait opinion pieces and stop removing comments that show they're full of it, then maybe we'll talk. Your writers' egos are not more important than the truth.

It's the sharing of content that plausibly bashes the outgroup and confirms the ingroup's dogma that continues to polarize, keeping people hooked on the superstimulus of having their opinions confirmed.

I see very very few people trying to see and understand that. Start by ungagging the ones who have been silenced and silod under the guise of false civility.

loup-vaillant• 9 years ago

I see two problems, which cause the 3 cited in the article.

First, the web does not scale. If your web site becomes popular, (even if temporarily), you have to handle the load, or suffer unavailability. This effect is magnified if you publish heavy files such as videos. This draws people towards centralised services such as blog and vlog platforms, which serve us ads and restrict free speech because that's how they make money and manage not to get sued every time someone says something illegal somewhere.

Second, the web has eaten the internet. We use it for email, file sharing… basically everything but phone apps and networked games. It's gotten so ubiquitous that nobody notices the serious attack on their internet connection: crappy upload, closed SMTP port, NAT…

The solution is as simple as it is impossible: we need to get rid of the web —mostly.

First, some infrastructure. We need symmetric bandwidth, public IP(v6), no closed ports, and a nice 5W home server/router/firewall that's always on.

Second, we need to replace web services by something else. Publishing should be handled by peer-to-peer protocols similar to BitTorrent, so that popularity doesn't eat all your bandwidth. And poof, just like that, services like Medium and YouTube are no longer needed. So are centralised social networks —we can do decentralised restricted publishing. Everyone can of course have their own mail server, no need for gmail to spy on us. Public forums can probably be decentralised as well, maybe if we take inspiration from newsgroups?

Then the web will scale back to its proper place, and hopefully will stop being a threat to our freedoms.

baptistem• 9 years ago

What if we start by having honest title? like : Sir Tim Berners-Lee words about today's web

I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

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