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

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.