Could the Web Not be Invented Today?

An anonymous reader writes " Corante's Copyfight has a piece up about this new column in the Financial Times by James Boyle celebrating (a few days on the early side) the 15th anniversary of Berners-Lee's first draft of a web page . The hook is this question: What would happen if the Web were invented today? From the article: 'What would a web designed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation or the Disney Corporation have looked like? It would have looked more like pay-television, or Minitel, the French computer network. Beforehand, the logic of control always makes sense. Allow anyone to connect to the network? Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy and pornography. And of course it is. But it is also much, much more...The lawyers have learnt their lesson now...When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident. That is not a happy thought.'"

Comments

First thing we must do...

[Archeopteryx]

...we must kill ALL the lawyers.

Re:First thing we must do...

[flannelboy]

I think we are overstating Lawyer's ability to figure out what the next "big thing" will actually be. They are usually late to the game, and only in a position to post-sue, rather than preventitive sue.

I think (may be mis stating this) Napster was around for at least a year before the lawyers made their way into court. Of course, that just proves that "better late than never" is also on the lawyers play card.

Lets hope they don't shut down the current web as we know it!

Re:First thing we must do...

[dourk]

IANAL.

Thank god.

Re:First thing we must do...

[TetryonX]

There is no such thing as "preventive suing". You must allow the act to be committed before it can be taken to court. What happened was not that they lawyers were late, it was the RIAA/MPAA/others that were slow to realize that their business model was going to be compromised by p2p; something isn't a threat until its big and in your face. Of course, they were and still are blind to why they've been experiencing a weakened bottom line.

Else there'd be a lot of people being sued for piracy at your 18th birthday since "Well, we figure you'll pirate SOMETIME in the future if you haven't already."

subnote: The RIAA does not take into account that consumer spending was shifted after the stock market's y2k-bubble burst. Therefore their entire belief that 'p2p is the devil and is causing us to lose money' is moot because they were going to lose anyways- people could not afford to spend as much money (if at all) as they used to on CDs/other merchandise. Therefore they would have experienced a relatively same fall in their overall bottom line, which then they would have found something else to convieniently blame it on. I know many people who lost at least 30% of their yearly income because of the y2k-burst and no longer could afford to buy cds or any other useless crap.

Re:First thing we must do...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbl'd o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings; but I say 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.

Re:First thing we must do...

[anthropomorphized]

As a lawyer, I find it disturbing (and amusing) how much is blamed on lawyers. Lawyers are hired guns. A lawyer does not and can not patent anything or sue anyone by him/herself. It is usually businesses and the people who run them that make those decisions. It is business people that decide what to lobby. Yes, lawyers counsel those clients and help them with strategy and often shape arguments.

Admittedly, lawyers always have the option to decline representation for something they find morally reprehensible, however, believe it or not, lawyers are also supposed to follow a code of ethics which often places a certain obligation to represent people.

Disclaimer: Of course it's not really this cut and dry, but we do ourselves a disservice by placing all the blame on laywers. In this case, killing the lawyers would just mean the underlying technology of the web would be patented by the inventors themselves (as required by their employment contract) or by patent agents (engineers/scientists that are admitted to the patent bar and are NOT lawyers).

Re:First thing we must do...

[Dashing Leech]

"Computer language - something with very clear syntax rules - is the way to go. "

I seriously hope you are joking. There's a bunch of problems with that idea that are immediately obvious. First, the main problem is that there is no hard line "right" and "wrong" in most cases. Whys is it safe to go 64.9 mph but 65.1 mph is unsafe? That's unreasonable. However, the law has to say something because going way to fast is definitely dangerous. The "reasonableness" is often part of the law. The only way to program that is with some sort of fuzzy logic.

Second, related to the first, is that the problem with the ambiguity of the law now is that it is, in fact, being written like computer syntax. Since there are few absolutes, all sorts of exceptions (if ... then) and variability ("reasonable") have to be built in. Ambiguities tend to be these cases. "Don't kill" is easy. Except self-defense. Except defense of a third person. If you are insane, different punishment. How abonormal do you have to be to be insane? Who judges? And so forth. That is exactly why laws are unreadable, because they try to fill loopholes and cover all cases like a computer program needs to do.

Third, how they hell are people supposed to understand what the law says? People speak in English, they don't speak computer languages. Programmers might be able to reverse engineer it, so then the programmers would effectively become the lawyers, which in follow the second problem above, is exactly the case now. Lawyers reverse engineer the language of the law to see what it says.

In short, computer-like syntax is the problem here already. Unfortunately, since all situations are essentially different, and there are few absolute rights and wrongs, there is no real solution that works well.

I just thought

[krajo]

of a great new way to share stuff on the net anonimously ! Wait a sec there's someone knocking on my front door. Be right back... "And in related news, inventor found lynched by a mob of record executives. Now sports."

Thanks Tim!

[DDiabolical]

It's completely down to Tim Berners Lee that the internet is a free and open as it currently is. Preceding the Linux or the GNU, he was a real hacker creating something that he couldn't have known would change the world. He did it without profit in mind and as such it's been allowed to flourish.

Sure, the military may have created the fundamentals, but Tim was the first to put them to good use :P

Re:Thanks Tim!

[sleeper0]

Tim did a good thing for sure, but it was hardly unusual for things for the internet to be written without profit in mind - it would have been crazy at the time to think there was any money to be made there outside of services. And you might want to check your timeline, tons of people were using GNU software back when USENET, UUCP and 56k leased lines ruled the day.

Disruptive technologies can't be controlled.

[tonywong]

Just remember that networking was not a new phenomenom before the web.

We had Compuserve, Prodigy, Bix, eWorld, and probably a dozen other big ones that I can't recall. All of them got steam rolled by the internet because it was so 'disruptive'. One of the properties of being disruptive means upheaval and loss of a certain amount of control.

Perhaps google will introduce the next phase of communications through wireless gateways that are free, and put cell phone providers in the category of technological has beens...who really knows what will work and what will fail until it is done?

Re:Disruptive technologies can't be controlled.

[sleeper0]

Agreed. Why on earth wouldn't http and html be invented today? Only because possibly the niche is already filled. Does a would be inventor have to run their protocol by the property lawyers or disney before it gets popular now? Someone should inform Bram Cohen. I'm pretty sure the printing press, telegraph, radio, television, telephones and more were all disruptive technologies for some reason or another in their day. Thinking we've hit some kind of wall isn't looking very hard at the issue.

Re:Disruptive technologies can't be controlled.

[JWSmythe]

I had BBS's, and FidoNet (along with a few more obscure ones).

    We had fairly established, while unregulated networks. I won't say communication was fast, but it was there. I don't really need to review the wonderful capabilities of BBS's. Probably 25% of the folks who read here were users when BBS's were big.

    Could the internet be reinvented? Sure. But, like any large platform, it started small. The next Intranet is being built by a half dozen teenage kids in their darkend bedrooms around the world. It isn't anything now, but will be the biggest thing the world has seen.

It's an impossible scenario

[ReformedExCon]

First, if there were no internet and someone were to "invent" it today, it would be very similar to the Internet that was created years ago. It wouldn't have much content aside from a few indexes and maybe some scientific or technical content.

If the internet were created today, none of us would be online. We'd still be doing all the tedious tasks like making phone calls to clients and friends, and using hardbound encyclopedias and journals to find information. Newspapers would be making a ton of money selling ad space and subscriptions. Television would probably have a lot more content related to the writers' and producers' interests rather than based on viewer feedback.

In short, if the Internet were invented today, it would not have reached us mere mortals yet. And there is no reason to think that an Internet created in 2005 would be significantly different or more advanced than the Internet created in 1974.

The Internet itself has changed the rules of intellectual property. Without it, the media conglomerates would not be in the tizzy that they currently are in. It is precisely because of the ease of broadcast that the Internet gives us that we have media content creators trying to find ways to use the law to restrict users. In very real terms, the Internet that we are talking about here is the one created 1999 by Shawn Fanning. Until the arrival of Napster, Internet piracy was a drop in the bucket. Now it is one of the most often used features of the Internet, and it is because of that initial software that media companies sat up and took notice of all the copyrighted bits being transmitted right under their noses.

Re:It's an impossible scenario

[susano_otter]

Oh, very differently of course. But at that point the article becomes so orthogonal to reality as to be completely meaningless and inane.

I mean, the article is asking you to consider how a massively disruptive new communications technology would be developed, if we understood its implications in advance. The very first thing to become obvious when you consider this is that one of the fundamental principles of disruptive developments is that we do not and cannot understand them in advance.

Might as well write an article asking us to consider what sex would be like if we started out by having the orgasm, and then moved on to intimate touching. Easy enough to consider, but so far removed from reality as to be an exercise whose brevity was exceeded only by its pointlessness. Kind of like the exercise being proposed here.

Abandon Hope? Not Just Yet

[CornfedPig]

The lovely thing about truly disruptive technologies is that, at least initially, they are seen as not-very-good solutions to second-tier problems (here's Wikipedia on Chistensen's definition of a disruptive technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology ). This feature (not a bug!) can give good ideas the time to get a few steps out of the cradle before incumbent industries, their lawyers, and the political powers-that-be in their employ try to strangle them. It isn't much, but sometimes a little bit of a head start is all you can hope for.

Re:What!?

[Simon Garlick]

I just wish the rest of the world would show some goddamn RESPECT for the fact that fifteen years ago Tim Berners-Lee, AN AMERICAN, invented the Web while working at CERN, you guessed it, IN AMERICA.

You have to take the bad with the good

[dadioflex]

Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too.

All in jest I know...

[Infonaut]

... but lawyers represent the rule of law. If you've ever been in a country that doesn't have lawyers, you understand the humor in that "Oh, I think we want to keep these proceedings as pleasant as possible" comment from Pleasantville.

It would easily be invented today

[Jason1729]

Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN in Switzerland when he invented the web. There would be absolutely no problem inventing it there today.

Perhaps it would have been much slower to penetrate the US market, but that would not mean it couldn't exist basically as it does now.

There have been recent articles here about how the US is slipping into a technical dark age. This is just one more example of how that's true.

Re:Solution?!

[Cally]

Example: there are armed anarchist revolutions going on in Iraq and France right now today

No, there aren't. Go and read up on the real anarchist revolutions that happened in Barcelona in the late 30s. George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" would be a good start.

Oh! The irony!

[Mr.Progressive]

After killing all lawyers, you're going to need a hell of a legal team...

Re:Oh! The irony!

[TheRaven64]

Judge: You are charged with killing all of the lawyers. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?

Defendant: Aren't judges lawyers?

Judge: *gulp*

Minitel

[Anne Honime]

I think the minitel comparison is completely unfair ; minitel was operated on normal telephone lines, therefore, anybody with a line and a computer could open a non-profit minitel service or a bbs, and many did. Now long forgotten french home computers made by Thomson were sharing their charset (no ascii) with minitel for exactly that purpose.

At the time it was released (begining of the 80's), minitel was probably one of the most advanced and low cost electronic net in the world, it greatly helped many people to get acquainted with technology. And it had porn too.

Lack of evolution and internet competition killed it, but for 15 years I can't think of anything more or less competing with it anywhere in the world in terms of accessibility and richness of content. And it delivered for (almost) free ! The terminal was lended by France Telecom to anybody at no cost. You paid for the service, at the price of a (sometimes premium) communication. Not really cheap, but a strong incentive for sure.

For certain services, I still use it today, because minitel warrants the user he's talking to the right person (no MIM hack), and the price has no hidden traps.

Not Fair Comparaison

[trollable]

Your comparaison with the french minitel is not fair, IMHO. If the internet would look like the minitel, it would be:

1) Cheaper
At that time, connections were charger per minute. The range for the minitel was between $0.05 and $2.00, the range for the internet started at $0.35. Addtionaly, the terminal was FREE.

2) More used
There was millions of minitel users in France, and only tens of thousands of internet ones.

3) Faster
Well, the minitel modem was only 1200-bps, while you could get a 9600-bps one for the internet. However, the route was direct and the pages much lighter. So the time-per-page was lower.

4) Styled
The minitel was a character terminal, black and white. Colors and graphics were introduced later. Same for the web. But you could get some effects.

5) More organised
The minitel had a single namespace (mainly 3615). Not a really good thing but definitively more organised and controled.

Finaly, the minitel could be connected to a PC (via serial). You could use it confortably from your PC or you could connect BBS. You could even host your own server. At that time, it was almost impossible on the internet.

----
http://www.milliondollarscreenshot.com/

Excellent!!!

[Archeopteryx]

You are the ONLY one to have gotten the reference; Shakespeare's "Henry VI, Part Two"

From act four;

ALL God save your majesty!

CADE I thank you, good people: there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord.

DICK The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

CADE Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. How now! who's there?