As open internet advocates pressure governments and major tech companies to respect the free flow of information online and users’ privacy, World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee spoke Wednesday about how his creation has gone “from utopia to dystopia in 29 short years,” and how it can be reimagined “to empower the hopes we had for the original web.”
Noting that experts say 2018 is first year that more than half the world’s population will be connected to the internet, Berners-Lee gave a lecture at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in which he outlined the underlying principles that guided the web’s development in the 1990s and proposed a more positive future than its current path suggests.
“The assumption we made in the ’90s was that, if we succeed in keeping an open web and a neutral internet, there would emerge a cornucopia of constructive, collaborative things and the world would become better,” Berners-Lee said. Speaking about the prevailing mindset among his colleagues at the time, he said they believed it wouldn’t matter “how much junk” was out there.
“It’s not email, it’s not forced upon you,” he said. “You only have to read what you want to read. If there’s a lot of bad stuff out there, it’s okay because you don’t have to read it. What could go wrong?”
Like many inventions, over nearly three decades, the web has evolved in unexpected ways, which has led Berners-Lee to call for the creation of “a new web,” or a reimagining of the internet as we know it so that it can live up to its founders’ expectations.
Such an endeavor would entail bringing together “the brightest minds from business, technology, government, civil society, the arts, and academia” to establish a system “in which people have complete control of their own data; applications and data are separated from each other; and a user’s choice for each are separate.”
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