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Like Democracy, the Web Needs To Be Defended
climenole tips a great article by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in Scientific American. Quoting:
"The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles. The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments — totalitarian and democratic alike — are monitoring people's online habits, endangering important human rights. If we, the Web's users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want."
Are there really many human beings defending small 'd' democratic values, period?
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Is "just one web" really the best thing? What about competition? We've already seen how a tendancy towards global finance can increase the scale of disaster. If somebody attacks THE WEB, it's a global disaster. If they attack ONE OF THE WEBS, there is the possibility of switching to the other network when that happens.
some person's private information is NOT the resource of the site that stores it. a person's private information belongs to that person alone. there can be no other argument to that.
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Software patents are one of the biggest threats. Writing a website is writing software, and having a website today is essential for many parts of our democracy. Campaigns on issues or for candidates need websites. Further, writing software is an important freedom in itself, like the freedom to write a book. Most people will never do either, but we all benefit from the small percentage of people who do.
Writing functional software often means reading and writing common data formats, so a patent on a format turns into a veto on others being able to write functional software in that domain.
(In reality, political candidates will never get threatened by patent owners - the patent owners don't want the politicians to feel first-hand how much of a problem it is.)
Berners-Lee makes a quick reference to it in TFA:
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Exactly! If I want to make my information available only to some people and not to others, that's MY right. And if a "large social-networking site" helps me do that, good for them, and I am more likely to use them than I would a system that says: "you MUST make ALL information public, or not share it with anybody at all."
I agree with Berners-Lee on his other points, but not that one. And I don't know why he would lead with that one.
Tim has been trying to get the "Semantic Web" project started up for ages. Social Networking sites already collect tons of excellent, linked, semantic information which could be very useful for those efforts.
I think that's the point he was trying to get across.
Worked great for Compuserve and AOL back in the day.
The way I figure it will play out, the major telcos will do it quickly followed by everyone else when Google, iTunes and Amazon cave and pay the protection money. It'll suck for 10 years or so, amazon.com and others will eventually close up shop, people will get bored with AT&TOL and go back to cable tv for their hundreds of channels of nothing important. Companies will stop buying "keywords", and when AT&TOL is begging for people to please give them a try because they put the internets in your computer, someone else will finally step up to the plate and either force cities to break their franchise agreements or manage to con the banks out of enough financing to buy up significant chunks of good wireless spectrum and start selling "the real internet". A .com boom will take off again as people discover that they can go to all sorts of websites, not just the ISP-sanctioned keywords, and we'll be back in the late 90's again before you know it... just in time for the y2038 crisis.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Maybe Tim Berners-Lee, and W3C, can chair a process of drafting a constitution protecting
at least the minimum standards of acceptable behavior of actors and intermediaries on the
web. Perhaps this would result in a lowest-common-denominator set of standards, but maybe
that would be better than nothing.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The problem with the semantic web is taxonomy. Taxonomy is inherently based on a point of view, which is incompatible with the wild individualism of the Internet. A good example is the Usenet newsgroup name space, which engendered countless destructive wars between news admins and users in the 1990s, all over what to name a newsgroup and how it fit in to the hierarchy imagined by the news admins.
Of course the news admins almost always won, since they held the power. But on the open Web, nobody has the power to enforce a strict taxonomic classification of web sites and their associated semantic content. The only places that provide the centralized authority necessary to enforce that kind of organization are the walled gardens like Facebook, so I doubt that Tim will ever see his dream realized.