Tim Berners-Lee shares his disappointment on World Wide Web’s 29th birthday

http://tecknowlogic.com/world-wide-webs-29th-birthday/

by tecknowlogic • 8 years ago

41 45 8 years ago

This is the same guy who praised inclusion of DRM as a web standard? Really Tim?

ChrisSD9• 8 years ago

Technically a plugin interface was defined as a web standard, what it connected to didn't necessarily have to contain DRM. Of course in practice it was designed for DRM (and makes little sense outside of that) so I get your point.

On the other hand, our other options were plugins such as flash, using apps outside of the browser for video sites, or browsers each going their own way with proprietary technology. Or some mixture of those three.

realusername• 8 years ago

using apps outside of the browser for video sites

I would still prefer that than including DRM into web pages, at least it's a bit harder for users to use DRM.

mtgx• 8 years ago

At least then third-party DRM services, which could in theory work on any platform, would be viable.

With this "plugin interface" the DRM only has to come from the OS vendor. This is why you're now starting to see certain Netflix resolutions only working on certain browser. The browser vendors have already started abusing the real power of DRM: control over competition.

paulmd4• 8 years ago

Technically a plugin interface was defined as a web standard, what it connected to didn't necessarily have to contain DRM
Of course in practice it was designed for DRM (and makes little sense outside of that)

So "WELL ACKCHYUALLY" but in defense of DRM?

Perhaps if the veneer of legitimacy is so transparently thin that you can't even be bothered to defend it yourself, you could just not grant it that legitimacy. The academic points really don't matter compared to the fact that you are defending stuff that is hurting us.

LPT: the cause that you are exercising your debate skills in favor of actually does matter, all causes are not actually equal.

jasonkostempski3• 8 years ago

Or video stops being distributed with DRM like almost all audio did. We would have won that war eventually if it wasn't made so easy to use. We were so close when the browsers started shunning plugins like flash. That standard has practically guranteed we will never see it happen.

jfaucett2• 8 years ago

"The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared."

I think that now this isn't an internet only phenomena. It seems its bleeding over into other markets as well. Amazon has already taken over much of retail, and even traditionally non tech companies (see Unilever or Pearson) have, through mergers, acquisitions, and other traditional business processes taken over massive portions of their respective markets.

This is just something, as a sideline observer I think could be happening, still chance observations, general stock market watching, and news articles are horrible guides for understanding what's really going on. Does anyone know what the research says? Do we have, in general, a convergence of markets into oligopolies dominated by a few big players like what's happened in much of the tech world?

aikinai• 8 years ago

Amazon has already taken over much of retail

Amazon only covered 4% of US retail in 2017. I couldn't easily find the global figure, but it would obviously be much much smaller.

As for the overall idea, I think it depends on the time scale you look at. Compared to the late 20th century things do seem more consolidated now, but if you go back any further we're still probably in one of the most distributed modern economies ever.

jfaucett2• 8 years ago

Amazon only covered 4% of US retail in 2017.

Where did you get that statistic? Was that before the wholefoods acquisition? That seems very high to me, especially when you consider what retail covers. [1]

I think it depends on the time scale you look at

Thinking about the time scales provides an interesting perspective. I think the core question is whether or not consolidation is a net positive or net negative for features we want in society (like innovation, freedom of choice, ability to self actualize, efficiency, productivity, etc). Even then it most likely depends on how we weight those feature priorities.

1. https://www.thebalance.com/us-retail-industry-overview-28926...

alatz• 8 years ago

Tim Wu's The Master Switch gives a good historical overview of the consolidation of power that happens in various media/technologies.

Long story short, he says what's currently happening with the internet has happened before. New mediums follow "The Cycle", which means they progress from decentralized to centralized.

chongli• 8 years ago

I think that now this isn't an internet only phenomena.

Of course it isn't. It happens to pretty much everything. Pareto's Principle in action. It's so frustrating that this happens but I see no way of fixing it.

gjvc• 8 years ago

If only he'd been in the audience for this talk

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lfyou/alan_ka...

Hasknewbie• 8 years ago

Since this article is only a rehash of the original one, wouldn't it be better if this thread pointed to it directly?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/12/tim-be...

netsharc• 8 years ago

It sounds like one generated by an SEO-bot too... Tell-tale: it keeps repeating his name, because sentences that refer to him with "he" do not make good search result snippets.

QasimK• 8 years ago

Can I share my low-quality disappointment that the primary article image is a 1.1MB PNG of (I assume) Tim Berners-Lee. No wonder it loaded slowly.

icebraining• 8 years ago

Only because you have a hires screen. It uses srcset to select an appropriately-sized image (my browser loads a 650KB version).

sametmax• 8 years ago

Since when having a hi-res screen mean very fast internet ? My laptop has a higher res than my desk screen and I'm reading this from the crappy airport wifi.

Agathos• 8 years ago

At exactly what resolution does it begin to make sense to encode a photograph as a PNG instead of a JPEG?

minusf• 8 years ago

how is a 650kb PNG file better when an 80kb JPEG could do the same?

golemotron• 8 years ago

Can he please be upbeat on the 30th birthday of the web?

Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Kay, (and to a lesser extent) Richard Stallman do a lot of messaging that is "this is not what I had in mind." It's good but it might be interesting to see each of them talk about what we've gotten right for a change.

Synaesthesia• 8 years ago

Criticism isn’t just done because they’re cranky. It’s because they care, and want to improve the web. Anybody can acknowledge the good parts of the web but that doesn’t help it improve.

cocktailpeanuts3• 8 years ago

I respectfully disagree with him about regulation.

If open technology failed by becoming closed, it should be another open technology that defeats it, not some government.

Instead if regulating old tech, they should come up with ways to encourage implementation of open and decentralized technologies.

This pendulum swing between centralization and decentralization is almost a given and I'm sure it will happen in one way or another if history is any evidence. It sucks that the world works the way it does, but this frustration is exactly what will spur innovation.

Trying to solve this with regulation will do more harm than good because it will only slow down the potential innovation that will inevitably come as the frustration intensifies. It will come naturally because people become fed up with all the bullshit in the world.

deerpig• 8 years ago

The breakup of Ma Bell required a regulatory breakup. Bell Telephone was just too entrenched to break up on decentralize on it's own, short of a collapse.

No amount of innovation outside of Bell Telephone could have broken it up. TBL might be correct that we are near that point today with the Internet. The big players either buy you our or copy your innovation and crush you.

In fact it's worse than that. Look at all the advise given to startups. Create something that one of the big players will need and get bought out -- that's been the dream for most startups for a long time now. This is reinforced and required by VC investors. The whole idea of building an small or medium sized Internet company that intends to become profitable and remain in business is now the exception rather than the rule.

Everything in the Silicon Valley ecosystem is designed to reinforce the big players.

TBL might be right that it could take a Ma Bell breakup kind of intervention to space where innovation outside of the big companies can have a chance. It's not that there isn't a level playing field. There isn't a playing field left at all -- it's branded multi-billion dollar stadiums all the way down.

cocktailpeanuts3• 8 years ago

That's a valid comparison but not relevant to this particular case IMO.

The phone network was completely and physically owned by Bell.

This is different from the Internet. Bell had the absolute infrastructure advantage and no new entry could compete with them because of the existing infrastructure, because competing would mean investing in infrastructure and that was near impossible.

That is different from how the Internet works. It is true that the WWW layer became centralized but the lower level stack already has all the ingredients we need to realize a revolution. There is no physical and absolute monopoly or oligopoly on the low level Internet protocol.

My point is, trying to fix this with regulation is superficial because all they're trying to do is solve it on the application layer instead of trying to fix it fundamentally from a lower level.

Regulation may help a bit in the short term, but as I mentioned, in the long term it doesn't help because it will only slow down true innovation because people won't suffer enough. All revolutions naturally occur when people start suffering and the suffering crosses certain threshold.

I wouldn't say this if it was physically impossible to disrupt the status quo, but I do believe it's possible without any government intervention and in fact will be more effective if governments don't intervene and let the market take care of it eventually.

You can already see the sentiment moving towards this direction and I think it's a matter of time that there will be enough critical mass to shift away from these centralized "big players".

manjushri• 8 years ago

How about the getting rid of patent law? That would get rid of patent trolls, overzealous regulations and spur decentralizatiom.

Tim Berners-Lee shares his disappointment on World Wide Web’s 29th birthday

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