The Web's Creator Thinks We Need a New One That Governments Can't Control (thenextweb.com)

The web has created millions of jobs, impacted nearly every industry, connected people, and arguably made the world a better place. But the person who started it all isn't exactly pleased with the way things have turned out to be. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, believes that the way it works in the present day "completely undermines the spirit of helping people create." The Next Web reports: "Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network with the web," said Brewster Kahle, who heads up Internet Archive. And he's not wrong: governments across the globe keep an eye on what their citizens are accessing online and some censor content on the Web in an effort to control what they think. To that end, Berners-Lee, Kahle and other pioneers of the modern Web are brainstorming ideas for a new kind of information network that can't be controlled by governments or powered by megacorporations like Amazon and Google.The New York Times originally reported on this and has more details. (But it is also paywalled.)

Comments

Oh yeah?

[Bovius]

That's hilarious. You go right ahead and then come back and tell us your cool idea about a global infrastructure that can't be controlled by the organizations who build and maintain said infrastructure.

Re:Oh yeah?

[Kjella]

Hrm - how long have governments, corporations, and cartels been trying to kill Bittorrent off again?

The government doesn't care that you download Game of Thrones or Justin Bieber, really they don't. It's half of "bread and circus" and a huge tech industry driver, despite the lip service they give the content industry. Share something really illegal on BitTorrent and you'll soon have cops knocking at your door. Or in your door. I'm sure you've heard of the four boxes of liberty, the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the ammo box. Conversely, those who seek to oppress don't really care unless one of those is threatened. If most people listen to mainstream media, they own the soap box. The first past the post system locks down the ballot box. The legal system keeps the jury's power a guarded secret. As for the ammo box, a few guns are no match for a para-military police.

Look at modern day authoritarian states, it's not the Soviet Union anymore where they try to keep totalitarian control. They've found it's completely pointless, for the most part the average person in China cares about the same things as in the US as they did in the Roman Empire, if they have a decent paycheck and having a good time they're not going to topple the government. Both the rise and fall of the Soviet Union came because life had turned to shit, while China's government seems rock solid and Tiananmen Square is now 25+ years ago. The individuals are like ants compared to the government, you don't really care what they do unless they're ganging up to threaten you.

Does it have blackjack?

[PvtVoid]

And hookers?

Only an academic...

[argStyopa]

...could look at something that was conceived, paid for, and built by the US defense department and sigh "Don't you wish we could have this without all that pesky GOVERNMENT involvement?"

Re:Only an academic...

[Guy Harris]

ARPANET was US funded as well was TCP/IP (made at Berkeley or MIT can't remember which),

If you mean the TCP and IP protocols, RFC 791, "INTERNET PROTOCOL/DARPA INTERNET PROGRAM/PROTOCOL SPECIFICATION" and RFC 793, "TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL/DARPA INTERNET PROGRAM/PROTOCOL SPECIFICATION" were "Developed ... by Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California". TCP was, to quote that RFC, "based on concepts first described by Cerf and Kahn in {Cerf, V., and R. Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication", IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. COM-22, No. 5, pp 637-648, May 1974}".

If you mean implementations of those protocols, a very important implementation was done at Berkeley.