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Tim Berners-Lee Warns About the Web's Three Biggest Threats (webfoundation.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the next-28-years dept.

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?"

10 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. You can't have it both ways. by Larsen+E+Whipsnade · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Free exchange or censorship. Pick one. And besides, censorship never fixed the problem of fake news. The only solution to fake news is for readers not to be gullible.

    Want a second opinion? Here's one: HTTP and HTML are getting long in the tooth, and Javascript is bloat. Maybe it's time to come up with a new stack? Something with better controls for deep linking and embedding, and better support for distributed/cached store-and-forward, and mechanisms so Web 2.0 doesn't have to be such a bolt-on kluge. Maybe a decentralized reputation system so we can choose our own echo chambers more readily.

    I'm disappointed that after all these years Tim speaks mainly in slogans and generalities, and still can't avoid contradicting himself. Let's show him how it's done by talking brass tacks.

    1. Re:You can't have it both ways. by Z00L00K · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    2. Re:You can't have it both ways. by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Especially that he, himself, allowed EME into the standard, when he could stop it.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    3. Re:You can't have it both ways. by grumbel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. Conspicuously absent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Missing from his list:

    • DRM
  3. I used to think he seemed reasonable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    #1 threat to the web: Tim Berners-Lee endorsing DRM into web standards
    It's also pretty funny that he thinks misinformation is some new problem because Trump was elected or whatever - Information on the web has always been wildly untrustworthy, it's just that the dumb shit public have been gradually brainwashed by massive corporations to accept it as some authoritative source to sell more advertising.

  4. Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Kunedog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm disappointed that after all these years Tim speaks mainly in slogans and generalities, and still can't avoid contradicting himself. Let's show him how it's done by talking brass tacks.

    This.

    From the summary:

    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.

    That is literally what "gatekeeper" means, Tim.

  5. DRM, Tim... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    fair level of data control

    Unfortunately, Tim Burners-Lee has come out in favor of DRM in the HTML standard recently. As such, any "fair level of control" strikes me to essentially be "the corporation gets everything except for what they deign fit for us peons." Ultimately, that's what DRM is in practice.

    At this point, I can't help but wonder if he's being paid off somehow. Very, very few people who advocate a "free and open web" would put DRM anywhere near it, because they're aware that it's pretty much a contradiction. This only furthers the perpetuation of the copyright laws that are already grossly biased in favor of large corporations at the great expense of just about everyone else. One of those expenses is the "free and open web" itself, if they get their way.

  6. Small details. by DrYak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 ]
    1. Re:Small details. by nukenerd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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)

      - 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").

      Having plural gatekeepers does not solve the problem. "Plural" in practice means jerks like Zuckerberg, Gates, Cook, Nadella and Pichai being in control of gatekeeping. These are people who, as senior company officers, only their boards or shareholdes could remove : such actions in companies are very rare and even more rare over anything ethical, or their influence is not removable at all if they hold a massive share of the company (as in Gates' case). How is that any better than an independent single body that could be more easily changed?