Berners-Lee Launches New W3 Foundation

robertsonadams tips us to the initiation of the World Wide Web Foundation with $5M of seed funding from the Knight Foundation. From the announcement: "Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, unveils the World Wide Web Foundation. It aims to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand its capability and robustness, and to extend its benefits to all people on the planet." The new foundation's site should have video up soon of Berners-Lee's speech at the kickoff event. The foundation hopes to raise $50M–$100M and will issue grants in Web science, technology and practice, and Web for society. Initial plans will be disclosed early next year.

Comments

Job for the foundation: fight UN traceback

[Morgaine]

I suggest that Tim uses his influence and backing from the new foundation to fight this latest China-inspired UN move to provide IP traceback and lose anonymity across the net.

His WWW would never have blossomed the way it did under such Big Brother conditions, and we'd all be a lot poorer for it. The control freaks just don't understand the benefit of emergent systems, and that freedom has a price. Sure, we suffer a few annoyances and some real crimes, but it's still infinitely better than everybody living in a police state.

Re:Job for the foundation: fight UN traceback

[Zeinfeld]

His WWW would never have blossomed the way it did under such Big Brother conditions, and we'd all be a lot poorer for it.

It is hard to know where to start here.

Back in the 1990s the use of cryptography was subject to a whole rack of restrictions. The fight between advocates of cryptography and Louis Freeh's FBI is known as the crypto-wars and some folk like Phil Zimmerman were harassed in the same way that the FBI harassed Charlie Chaplin and other opponents of Hoover.

Fortunately there were also folk who were much smarter than Louis Freeh (not difficult, the man was personally responsible for botching the FBI response to leads that could have uncovered the 9/11 plot).

I was working with the Clinton-Gore '92 online campaign right at the start of the Web and later with the Whitehouse. They saw the opportunity to disintermediate the mainstream press, what W. has called 'the filter'.

But a much larger part of their concern was the ability to disintermediate the press in repressive regimes like Cuba, Saudi Arabi etc.

Back in the late 1980s the cold war was won, not by politicians making speeches but by the humble photocopier. Reagan's speeches didn't mean diddly behind the iron curtain, not unless you were in range of the Western TV stations. The communist state media did not report them much and if they did they would present them Faux News style. It was getting the photocopiers through the wall that allowed material to circulate.

East Germany fell in the end because a large number of young people just said 'enough, we are not going to support this system any more'. And they got that idea into their heads at the same time because the communication system had been taken out of the hands of state media.

It is new, certainly

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

They're not claiming to recreate the web or anything like that. Rather, Berners-Lee has expressed concern about some of the trends in the way the WWW is working, and is now doing something about it. One example cited in the media today is the difficulty in distinguishing between rumours and content from reputable sources, since there is no robust mechanism for indicating the authenticity or credibility of a web site. This has led to fears of the LHC sucking the world into a black hole or, more seriously, to parents being misinformed about the dangers of MMR vaccine and making health decisions that are not in their child's best interests because of the bad information.

I would suggest that this is a more general problem rather than anything specific to the web, and I don't believe it can ever be solved in all cases because there can never be an ultimate authority on all things, nor should there be. But an effort to provide a framework where realistically credible groups can be seen to endorse the content on certain sites as respectable has to be a step in the right direction: sometimes there's no substitute for seeing a qualified, experienced professional, but if I'm looking for general information on-line, I'd rather know that the professional-looking site I'm reading has been vetted by expert medical, legal, financial, technical or other eyes, as appropriate, rather than just being designed by someone with a good eye but containing content that is misleading or outright dangerous.

Re:Maybe he's onto something here

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Irony for the day: the sort of misinterpretation in the parent post and the rumours that result are exactly the sort of things Berners-Lee was concerned about in a recent interview. (See also: Slashdot article summaries. ;-))

Re:"Inventor" should be quoted

[NickFortune]

His contribution was, no doubt, huge, but the inventor he was not -- considering the existence of all the prior works, including Gopher, there was nothing in his work, that was not "obvious to someone skilled in the art".

Umm... your wikipedia link points at an entry in the talk page for Sir Tim's wikipedia entry. It cheerfully conflates Internet and Web in order to try and make a case. There are some fairly robust rebuttals there as well.

Citing such poor quality references weakens your argument rather than strengthening it.

Re:The real problems of the WWW ...

[jmcwork]

I think this post is on the right track. Since the WWW is essentially user interface and data distribution system (a truly amazing one) on top of a worldwide network infrastructure, and since most of the issues are content or access related, it seems that you would run into most of the same problems without the WWW layer in place. I could use archie to find an ftp site with music files on it then use ftp and mget to pull over some subset of those files with a single command. Same problems with RIAA, copyrights, etc. If I then try to access an ftp site which contains information my country considers subversive and they can trace my IP address, I still end up in jail without ever using a browser.

Re:Endorsement, webs of trust, etc.

[theshowmecanuck]

To some people Drudge might be a heck of an endorsement. To the ones who want him to be. There are groups to whom different people will place greater emphasis on credibility than on others. For example, the people who like Drudge likely won't think much of the New York Times newspaper, a source many people would trust. I don't think the endorsements thing would work for this reason. There are enough people out there who will support anything. If it did anything at all, it would act to label and easily find the sites and groups who espouse one's own thinking, and keep you in only those groups. So if you are easily lead to believe vaccines gave your kid autism, given human nature you will look for people of like mind and look for groups endorsed by them. So in the end, this would be worse for the web with regard to getting people to look outside their own group. It would make it more likely that people won't look outside. At least now, when you search the web for vaccine and autism, you might hit a link saying that there is no connection between the two as much as hitting a link where it supports some people's wishful thinking; mainly because there is not an easy way to see if the site is from a person like minded as you.