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

Quick!

[BitterOldGUy]

Let's find all the jokes that have been posted about the Web being forked and post, "See! We told you so! Funny mod my ass!"

"One Web that is free and open"

[gogita21]

One Web to rule them all...

Re:"One Web that is free and open"

[rk87]

Bastard, ya beat me to it!

Three Interwebs for the AT&T-kings under Bell Labs,
Seven for the GNU-lords in their halls of source,
Nine for Mortal n00bs doomed to pwnage,
One for the Borg on his dark throne
In the Land of Internet where the /b/tards lie.
One Web to connect() them all, One Web to gethostbyname() them,
One Web to bring them all and in the darkness bind() them
In the Land of Internet where the /b/tards lie.

Re:Is this news?

[Lenneth]

It's aim is to improve the web not recreate it. :)

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.

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.

World Wide Web Foundation

[tripmine]

W3F?!?!?

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.

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.

Re:Maybe he's onto something here

[Anonymous Coward]

The "ready in 2022" for HTML5 is not the date for HTML5 spec completion, it's the date of when it'll be supported in Internet Explorer.

Knight Foundation - here comes Knight Rider

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, Knight Foundation is footing the bill, I am sure we will see Michael, and Kit running the show...seriously having Kit run the web would be awesome....knight rider rules

Maybe, maybe not

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Hopefully the WWWF will take a rather more balanced view than that expressed in the parent post. I have some faith that it will: Berners-Lee has always struck me as both a smart guy and someone who genuinely wants to do the right thing. It is interesting that considering issues such as privacy and security is explicitly mentioned in the WWWF concept paper (available on their web site), but that Berners-Lee also told the BBC he was concerned about the need to separate rumour from reliable information on the web. Whether or not on-line anonymity should be possible is pretty fundamental to these issues.

Re:pr0n driving the web forward

[Joebert]

From now on, every time you're whackin it to some porn on the Internet, right before you ruin your tube sock, you're going to remember one thing, somewhere in the world, at that very moment, there's another dude whackin it to the same free porn. And guess what, he read this and is thinking about you too.

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.

The foundation's work is primarily educational

[davide marney]

From http://www.webfoundation.org/programs/

The Foundation will launch with three projects:
Web Science and Research, Web Technology and Practice, and Web for Society.

The output of the projects will be:

- Studies
- Basic research
- Thought leadership
- Curricula
- Conferences, workshops, etc.
- Support for organizations developing Web standards
- Support for organizations using the web to solve social problems
- Training materials, guidelines, etc.

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.