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Tim Berners-Lee Warns About the Web's Three Biggest Threats (webfoundation.org)
Sunday was the 28th anniversary of the day that 33-year-old Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for the World Wide Web -- and the father of the web published a new letter today about "how the web has evolved, and what we must do to ensure it fulfills his vision of an equalizing platform that benefits all of humanity."
It's been an ongoing battle to maintain the web's openness, but in addition, Berners-Lee lists the following issues: 1) We've lost control of our personal data. 2) It's too easy for misinformation to spread on the web. 3) Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding. Tim Berners-Lee writes:
We must work together with web companies to strike a balance that puts a fair level of data control back in the hands of people, including the development of new technology like personal "data pods" if needed and exploring alternative revenue models like subscriptions and micropayments. We must fight against government over-reach in surveillance laws, including through the courts if necessary. We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem, while avoiding the creation of any central bodies to decide what is "true" or not. We need more algorithmic transparency to understand how important decisions that affect our lives are being made, and perhaps a set of common principles to be followed. We urgently need to close the "internet blind spot" in the regulation of political campaigning.
Berners-Lee says his team at the Web Foundation "will be working on many of these issues as part of our new five year strategy," researching policy solutions and building progress-driving coalitions, as well as maintaining their massive list of digital rights organizations. "I may have invented the web, but all of you have helped to create what it is today... and now it is up to all of us to build the web we want -- for everyone." Inspired by the letter, very-long-time Slashdot reader Martin S. asks, does the web need improvements? And if so, "I'm wondering what Slashdotters would consider to be a solution?"
It's been an ongoing battle to maintain the web's openness, but in addition, Berners-Lee lists the following issues: 1) We've lost control of our personal data. 2) It's too easy for misinformation to spread on the web. 3) Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding. Tim Berners-Lee writes:
We must work together with web companies to strike a balance that puts a fair level of data control back in the hands of people, including the development of new technology like personal "data pods" if needed and exploring alternative revenue models like subscriptions and micropayments. We must fight against government over-reach in surveillance laws, including through the courts if necessary. We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem, while avoiding the creation of any central bodies to decide what is "true" or not. We need more algorithmic transparency to understand how important decisions that affect our lives are being made, and perhaps a set of common principles to be followed. We urgently need to close the "internet blind spot" in the regulation of political campaigning.
Berners-Lee says his team at the Web Foundation "will be working on many of these issues as part of our new five year strategy," researching policy solutions and building progress-driving coalitions, as well as maintaining their massive list of digital rights organizations. "I may have invented the web, but all of you have helped to create what it is today... and now it is up to all of us to build the web we want -- for everyone." Inspired by the letter, very-long-time Slashdot reader Martin S. asks, does the web need improvements? And if so, "I'm wondering what Slashdotters would consider to be a solution?"
I don't mind HTTP and HTML, they work reasonably well. The problem is all the ads injected/embedded from other sites than the source site.
What really worries me is that today some media outlets instead develops their own apps for reading their content where they claim that it will be a faster and better experience. I don't trust them and I see a risk with installation of apps because then the app has more ability to do suspect stuff on my device than what's normally possible with HTML and some JavaScript.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The big issue I have with HTML is that it's useless for publishing larger content, like books or even just multi-page articles. Thanks to hyper links it is of course possible to add some Next/Prev buttons to a webpage to represent such content, but those links are just hacks, not markup. eReader have developed their own formats (.ePub, .mobi, iBook, etc.) for accomplishing this task, but while they often are little more than a .zip with .html files, none of them are proper part of the Web and your regular web browser won't read them.
HTML had <link rel="next/prev"...> markup going back to HTML2.0, but it was never properly supported by any browser or developed into something that would be powerful enough to replace .ePub and Co. This to me is one of the big failures of the Web that nobody really talks about. The Web should be the place where you publish content, it should be the replacement of paper, but instead people are forced to use .ePub or .PDF for that task, as plain old HTML isn't doing the job.
The other elephant in the room are of course the hyper links. The Web still lacks any kind of content-addressability, it's all location based, thus when server go down or it's URL layout changes, all your hyperlinks break. Basic tasks like linking to a specific paragraph from another article are also not possible with HTML. Project Xanadu never got much traction, but it's really time for the Web to learn a thing or two from what they tried to accomplish back then.
We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem,
Notice the plural (emphasis mine)
while avoiding the creation of any central bodies to decide what is "true" or not.
That is literally what "gatekeeper" means, Tim.
There's a subtle difference :
- Tim wants the companies (plural) spreading informations/news to do a little bit of work to help assess the reliability of facts in the links that people pass around.
- Tim does not want a single central entity becoming the official authority on all truth (he doesn't want a central "Ministry of Truth").
They aren't contradictory.
But without paying attention, there's a risk that one devolves into the other.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]