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

pr0n driving the web forward

[Big Nothing]

Controversial or not - the pr0n industry has in many areas driven the web technology development forward for years. If I had $5M to throw into the advancement of web development I'd buy $5M worth of pr0n. ^^

 

Some urgent work to do

[pieterh]

1. Stop the moves in Europe to lock-down the Internet and install filters at every ISP, which are being pushed by the music, movie, and TV industries in cahoots with the telecoms giants that now control most of the ISP landscape.

2. Bring the Internet to Africa. For crying out loud, enough of the extortion already. Africans need cheap communications to escape their geographic and historic prison, and while GSM was a plausible attempt, it's being strangled by the telcos.

3. Invest in new platforms for free and open digital standards. These are the basis of the Internet and they are being strangled by firms like Microsoft which want to see their own technologies dominate.

Re:Some urgent work to do

[jc42]

1. Stop the moves ... to lock-down the Internet and install filters at every ISP, ...
2. Bring the Internet to Africa. ...
3. Invest in new platforms for free and open digital standards. These are the basis of the Internet and they are being strangled by firms like Microsoft which want to see their own technologies dominate.

All true, but note that this is nothing new. Much of the early history of the Internet was based on exactly these problems. The original US DoD funding for ARPAnet was openly aimed at fighting a growing problem in the military: They were using more and more electronic comm devices, but hardly any two pieces of equipment from different manufacturers could communicate sensibly. The corporate world everywhere wanted customers to buy only from them, and official standards didn't help much. Manufacturers found ways to "enhance" the standards in ways that were incompatible with competitors' equipment.

The solution was to build a new sort of "network" layer that ran on top of all the vendors' incompatible equipment. The new network would encode the data into a binary form that wasn't supposed to be understood by the lower-level equipment. The lower-level stuff was used simply to transport the bits, which at every interface would be translated into whatever form the next equipment could transfer correctly. At the final destination, whatever form the bits arrived in would be translated back into whatever form the last chunk of hardware wanted.

Initially this was expensive. It involved a lot of separate computers (the IMPs) that interceded all over the place. With time, as people understood how to do the job right, and solid-state circuitry became smaller, the job could be moved into circuit cards and then chips that did the same job. Now the Internet part of a gadget is small and cheap.

But the entire point was to admit that the companies that supply the hardware and connectivity would always be trying to sabotage any standards, and force customers to buy only their own equipment by blocking communication with competitors' equipment. The fact that ISPs and telcos are doing the same today should come as no surprise. They always have done this, and they always will. The questions isn't whether we can prevent this; we can't. The question is whether we can get our bits delivered through a network built of unreliable components. The fact that some components are actively trying to block traffic, for whatever reasons, is simply a fact of life. For the network to work, it has to work despite failures (accidental or intentional) on the part of the low-level comm equipment.

One obvious approach is to consider IPv4 as just a vendor-supplied network, and solve the ISPs' sabotage the same way we have for decades: Build another network layer above it that takes into account its failures.

Of course, we're well on our way to doing this. One part is known as "https". Another part is known by the name "mesh". Bittorrent implements another part. And others are under development. With time, we can make the corporate world's sabotage as irrelevant with the same approach we have been using since the 1960s, when the ARPAnet started up. We encode the data into forms that they can't decode, and when they drop or damage too many packets, we route around them.

Maybe he's onto something here

[MikeRT]

The existing foundations are all but useless. There is no good reason why HTML 5 should be ready by 2022 instead of 2009 or 2010. Hopefully Berners-Lee can actually get an organization started that will get real work done.

Endorsement, webs of trust, etc.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I think the trick is not to try to create an authority to give endorsements itself — which we seem to agree is doomed before it starts — but rather to begin with a mechanism by which a web site can claim one or more endorsements by named parties on specified dates, those endorsements and dates can be verified in real time, and there is a mechanism for immediate revocation by the endorsing party if a more recent check makes continued endorsement inappropriate.

As various recent discussions on SSL have considered, we are already part way there, but at the moment all you can do is prove you have a secure connection to a certain on-line resource, without knowing who is behind that resource in real life. This is already a significant problem for industries such as banking, but any structured identification protocols developed to help there could just as well be used to show that, for example, a site describing first aid procedures was verified and endorsed by the Red Cross within the last three months.

The overheads of getting real people to check sites before giving an endorsement might be prohibitive, and I'm not sure you'd get that many endorsements relative to the number of sites that might deserve them if there was time to check them all. But starting from that basis, we could move to more of a web-of-trust system. As Google proved with their Page Rank algorithm, even a relatively simple idea along these lines can be remarkably effective as a starting point.

Of course, Google's story also tells us that sooner or later, people will learn how to game such a simple system, and that is an as-yet unsolved problem. But that doesn't mean it can't be solved, particularly if we're talking about a new organisation with some real world resources that could get real people to investigate the credentials of major nodes in your trust network as a starting point. Community-driven web sites like Wikipedia have shown us another possible tool we could use: it's also a system that can be gamed, but usually not for long without someone noticing, and for the most part the information supplied is good.

There is a lot of potential complexity here, and there are many ways things could go wrong. I doubt any system will ever be perfect. However, it's not as if this is a win/lose scenario: just improving the signal/noise ratio is a benefit to everyone affected, and we could certainly do better than we do today.

Re:Endorsement, webs of trust, etc.

[coryking]

We need a way to tie the methods we use to identify ourselves in the real world to our online world. In the real world, we have drivers licenses, bank cards, passports, birth certificates, business licensing ... you name it. No need to re-invent the wheel with crazy schemes that try to avoid using our real life "proof of existence".

Somehow, a protocol stack needs to be created to let us take these real world things and get our exciting protocols to "verify" them. For example, some sites will text message your phone as a way to verify yourself. Imagine if you could type in your drivers license number, scan your fingerprint and the protocol would be smart enough to contact the issuer of the drivers license and verify you are the cardholder? Imagine if you could wave your passport in front of your computer and it would use that information to verify you? Imagine if you could warp the whole SSL trust system so your domain name would be verified against your local government instead of Verisign... like when you get your business license, the state could act as your certificate authority.

Like you say, there is a lot of potential complexity here. But I agree with you, we need stronger and "simpler" (for the end user) ways to map real live people/businesses to their online versions.

I'll toss one more thought out... stuff like this should have been addressed by IPv6. Instead of trying to be a direct mapping to IPv4, "they" should have made something that addresses modern day problems like this in the lowest regions of our protocol stack.

The real problems of the WWW ...

[debrain]

... are often legal. The technology will evolve because there are market incentives (not to mention curious and innovative actors). All legal actors, in contrast, will oppose this evolution because it operates against predictability. What point is evolving technology if the typical beneficial uses are undermined legally?

See (in no particular order) the disputes over: RIAA, MPAA, GPL, Copyright, Patents, Trademarks, Domain names, etc. I would argue that the most beneficial contribution to the world wide web would be researching, educating, and giving effect to laws that promote internet technology, as opposed to undermine it.

Network Neutrality?

[MobyDisk]

Since Tim-Burners Lee supports network neutrality I wonder if this foundation will assist in that cause.