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Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web: 'The System is Failing' (theguardian.com)
Olivia Solon, writing for The Guardian: The inventor of the world wide web always maintained his creation was a reflection of humanity -- the good, the bad and the ugly. But Berners-Lee's vision for an "open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries" has been challenged by increasingly powerful digital gatekeepers whose algorithms can be weaponised by master manipulators. "I'm still an optimist, but an optimist standing at the top of the hill with a nasty storm blowing in my face, hanging on to a fence," said the British computer scientist. "We have to grit our teeth and hang on to the fence and not take it for granted that the web will lead us to wonderful things," he said. The spread of misinformation and propaganda online has exploded partly because of the way the advertising systems of large digital platforms such as Google or Facebook have been designed to hold people's attention. "People are being distorted by very finely trained AIs that figure out how to distract them," said Berners-Lee. In some cases, these platforms offer users who create content a cut of advertising revenue. The financial incentive drove Macedonian teenagers with "no political skin in the game" to generate political clickbait fake news that was distributed on Facebook and funded by revenue from Google's automated advertising engine AdSense. "The system is failing. The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity promote truth and democracy. So I am concerned," said Berners-Lee, who in March called for the regulation of online political advertising to prevent it from being used in "unethical ways."
The battle for the medium is sadly lost.
Sir Tim.
... it's the people that are failing.
Cannot be considered a failure, ever
GTFO off Social Media.
Those who get their "news" from FB or Twitter are the problem.
Users rely partly on extensions to ensure the security of their browser, including common add-ons such as Noscript. Many of these are legacy extensions that take time to port to Firefox 57. Many APIs needed to run these essential extensions are not yet available. The stated goal of the Firefox developers is to prevent users from running legacy extensions. The web depends on browsing security, and the Mozilla Foundation has actively contributed to reducing that security. This is shameful, and it needs to be made widely known that the Firefox developers are causing harm by needlessly breaking extensions in Firefox 57. Also, it should be pointed out that "blueish" builds do allow for these legacy extensions to run, therefore there is no legitimate reason to prevent this in the official builds. Users are being harmed by the decisions of the Mozilla Foundation, who is well aware of the impact of their choices. Shame on the Firefox developers and the Mozilla Foundation.
It's still wagging the dog. You can't blame the success of propaganda on the "system". That issue falls directly on the shoulders of each user, who are only trying to get rich quick. Any and all calls for censorship of any kind need to be met with stiff resistance.
But are those particular lies what's making people miserable? The Macedonians create them to earn money to make their lives less miserable, then the lies get lapped up by people looking for an explanation for why their lives are miserable. The lies are a symptom, not a cause,
The web is a communications platform.
You can't control how people use it after it's been invented.
And tell me which other communications platform (newspapers. radio, TV, etc.) HASN'T soon been controlled by a handful of wealthy companies or individuals. The Web is no longer "free" because "civilization" has moved in. No more untamed frontier, no more Wild West. Say hi to the lawyers, govt, and big industrialists.
Ban all online advertising and tracking.
Maybe one day people will learn to have respect for themselves and tell corporations to stop profiting from selling data about them. Maybe.
Berner's Lee did not complain when CNN, BBC, The Economist and so on whipped the Plebejans into a the mood to attack Iraq.
To attack.
To destroy the peace.
To enable ISIS and similar nasties.
No Internet Required. Just plain old 1 percent obedient mainstream media.
Cry us an effing river, Anglosaxon elite servant !
But Berners-Lee's vision for an "open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries" has been challenged by increasingly powerful digital gatekeepers whose algorithms can be weaponised by master manipulators.
And one of those gatekeepers, ironically, being Berners-Lee as a designer of a system inimical to authors.
Ezekiel 23:20
The failed system is not the web. The failed system is democracy; the Web just helps prove that fact ever more.
"Representative" or not, democracy is one group dictating to another group.
Democracy is an equal voice for unequal people; why should the town drunk get as much of a say as the town medical doctor?
Why should the weight of a person's vote be independent of the outcomes of his previous votes?
Why should someone on welfare get as much of a say about society's resources as someone who is not on welfare?! That is a conflict of interest!
No, we should not be spreading "democracy". Rather, we should be spreading capitalism: The internalized cultural principle that interaction between individuals should be voluntary, as determined by agreements that are negotiated in advance of that interaction; the rules of the game need to be established before the game is played, and revising those rules is an iterative process—Law not by "legislation", but rather law by contracts between individuals.
Your allocation of capital (your allocation of the set of resources you control) is your "vote". If you make a "vote" that is productive for society, then you are rewarded with increased voting power (i.e., profit); if you make a "vote" that is unproductive for society, then you are admonished with decreasing voting power (i.e., a loss).
You want to make choices about how society's resources should be allocated? Then prove yourself worthy of making such choices. That is what being a member of society is; being a member of society gives you voting power, not the other way around—just having voting power does not make you a member of society.
This doesn't preclude helping those in need. THIS. DOES. NOT. PRECLUDE. HELPING. THOSE. IN. NEED.
Web 3.0 will most likely be built on blockchain technology, and resolve most of the issues mentioned above. e.g. advertising: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
What the W3C does is pretty much irrelevant, since they aren't really a browser vendor. (I think the Amaya project was ended years ago.)
If any browser vendor is to blame for Chrome becoming the standard, I think that blame would fall on Mozilla.
Firefox had some amazing momentum. It rapidly got to about 35% of the browser market, back when IE was its main competitor. But then Mozilla decided to throw it all away. They started making unwanted changes to Firefox, and continued doing this even after users screamed, "NO! STOP!". They also ignored mobile platforms until it was far too late, and even then they dicked around with the awful Firefox OS abomination instead of creating a usable mobile browser.
Now Firefox is down to about 5% of the market, and it has essential no mobile usage (0.25%). Firefox 57, which was released recently, is a hugely disruptive release, as it breaks Firefox's long-standing extension system. A lot of users have voiced displeasure with it, and it's likely that Firefox will lose a lot of its few remaining users as a result of this extension breakage, without actually drawing in any significant number of new users.
I know some Firefox fanatics will claim that Chrome is popular because it's "bundled" or "advertised by Google", but those claims are nonsensical. Neither of those force users to start using Chrome, and neither of those force users to continue using Chrome. The reality is that people use Chrome because it's a far better browser than Firefox. It's faster, it uses less memory, it works with more sites, it has much better support for corporate network environments, and people actually like it. Interestingly, most of Chrome's biggest benefits are also Firefox's biggest weaknesses!
It didn't have to be this way. Firefox could have continued to become the dominant browser had its developers just listened to what Firefox's users wanted. The users were very clear when they said they wanted a fast, light, and extensible browser. Yet the Firefox developers didn't listen, and instead forced stupid stuff like Australis, Hello, Pocket, Quantum and WebExtensions on Firefox's users.
If Firefox's users had been treated better, and if Firefox had been improved in ways that the users wanted, then they wouldn't have had to flee to Chrome just to get a barely tolerable browsing experience. We'd be looking at Firefox with 60% or more of the market, with Chrome down around 5%. But instead we got the opposite, where Chrome is the dominant browser, and Firefox is withering away into obscurity.
And thanks to Firefox's failure, Chrome has essentially become the decider of what is and isn't a web standard. Google will now decide the future of the web.
There are many more browsers than just Mozilla, Chrome and IE. All of whom are either Google or MS financed. Yeah, Mozilla gets most of their bucks from Google.
Just boycott the JavaScript nonsense by running a browser which has JS disabled.
Run your own little server at your DSL line.
Run YaCY.
Run a Jabber server.
Stop using the commercialware.
Grow up.
Turn off your SpyPhone. Learn to live for a few hours without the Tracking Device.
Learn to distrust the elite controlled media. That includes GUARDIAN.
Of course, academic Marxists *are* delusional...
Anyone who know a whit of history knows that an "open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries" is completely contrary to human nature and the economics it creates.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The most basic conflict is allowing fucking lawyers to vote/hold office.
Is it any surprise the system is built to benefit shysters?
Solution: Law students get 0.3 of a vote. Lawyers get 0. To run for office they have to forever give up their license to practice law.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Developers are to blame. We could have had decentralised, private, free, open, powerful, un-corporatised technologies, that valued user empowerment over faddish trends.
But developers spent their time coding walled garden smartphone apps, flat design monstrosities, and node.js based excuses for webpages. Web 2.0 became the "Responsive" Web Slow.mo, blogs became tweets, social media became mob rule, and the direction of the web stop being determined by contentious, capable, visionary people and instead became determined by whoever had the most start-up money or which hipsters beard was the curliest.
The built the web to escape High School, and it turned into one.
Academia has that pervasive problem where they create something great and think to themselves "Nobody would ever use this system maliciously and against how we intended it to be used in order to make vast sums of money for themselves. Nope, not even a possibility. Nobody would ever stoop that low."
The financial incentive drove Macedonian teenagers with "no political skin in the game" to generate political clickbait fake news that was distributed on Facebook and funded by revenue from Google's automated advertising engine AdSense. "The system is failing
So why aren't those Macedonian teens now facing charges for tax evasion or fraud? They surely didn't report correctly their income from these services. Right?
So, yeah, the web is dead. We just have the winners now, pretending they will rule forever with their caches full of all our data. My money's on a web 3.0 (no blockchain), not this attention/info stealing/ lifetime tracking nonsense.
What you call delusional, some call idealists.
A world without slavery, where women and men are considered equals, where conflicts between nations can be resolved through negotiation instead of war, where democracy is preferred to tyranny, where civilization trumps barbarism, is also contrary to human nature. Yet, all these goals are being achieved, albeit slowly.
Why ? Because of "academic marxists" and other types of idealists who believe that, against all odds, humanity can rise above basic animal barbarism and become more than the sum of its parts.
Failure? It is the most efficient Pornography distribution system ever created!
It was simply misunderstood what people REALLY wanted when there were no consequences.
Right, the fact that Google pushed Chrome on it's search page didn't factor into it at all.
Not to say Mozilla didn't/doesn't make any mistakes, but at least their users aren't the product
If you cannot be bothered to learn some basic HTML for your publishing needs, chances are you have no serious intellectual power anyway.
WYSIWYG stuff is mostly impossible to properly debug. Overcomplex, badly documented markup. Publishing for the DumbArds of industry.
This Wild-West-Web thing has been failing ever since it become more than just CERN's internal on-line bulletin board.
Regulate advertising and you still have to deal with biases in "news" which are far more persuasive than online advertising. I honestly don't know how Trump won with the way the news portrayed him but I'm pretty sure online ads weren't a source of success. If anything an advertisement is a reason not to believe what something is saying because you already know there is an inherent bias. Enough diet pills have made false promises about losing weight that anyone of voting age knows they can't be trusted. News on the other hand tends to lend some credibility or used to, and when they favor a candidate or party it is extremely obvious. They don't even hit it, they are blatantly editing things the way they want them, using language to describe something in an opposite way for different candidates, taking quotes out of context. If you are an expert at anything, when the topic you know extremely well comes up, not even a political topic, you realize the people in the news know nothing at all and are misrepresenting things. With politics it's even worse. Fact checking websites are even worse because they purport to be experts but do nothing different than news agencies. Nothing.
Pontificating by nerd celebrities aside, there is story after story after story about how the internet is made into a cesspool of bullshit, and the culprit is always one of the same 4 players, the ones who own the whole thing. Everyone is always like, "if they just tweak this or that, everything would be ok"... but for some reason, it's never, "we need to stop these same evil corps from constantly fucking everything up"...
Stop giving them chances. Google is evil. Facebook is evil. Amazon is evil. Microsoft is evil. Stop glorifying them and giving them a gazillion chances to constantly fuck us all over while they transfer the entirety of human wealth, knowledge, and discourse to be under their control. We must tear down these evil monstrosities.
"The inventor of the world wide web always maintained his creation was a reflection of humanity -- the good, the bad and the ugly."
Consolidation of knowledge and power into a few hands.. sounds pretty run of the mill to me.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Some people have suggested that votes be weighted by intelligence. Comparing that to your system, I reckon it's not far off.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
American Marxists are the tools of the banksters and globalist corporations.
Not less, but more nations have been plunged into civil war in the recent 20 years by America.
Why ? Because Russia was too impotent to threaten America with counter-war.
Now this has changed and the American-sponsored terrorists in Syria are bombed to the 72 virigins.
Iraq would not have been raped if Russia had not been too weak to keep the yank terrorists out in 2003.
All with the support of MSM media, not internet really needed. Quite the opposite, the internet is the sand in the gears of Anglosaxon Warmongering. That is what concerns this Anglosaxon elite lackey Berners Lee.
Look at the promise that television offered the world, and look what a cesspool that is now. TC garbage is popular enough that it's self-sustaining, even when it's managed by "professionals" who had better perform well or lose a paycheck. So apparently this is what the people want. There's even less motivation to be professional on the web.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
The open Internet (the web is just one protocol) is what matters. And for that to be 'open' means that each ordinary residential ISP customer or mobile ISP customer (phone owner/user) needs the empowerment of being able to host their own server/s. With that sort of Open Competition, empowerment instead of disempowerment can thrive.
One of the biggest crimes of the last few decades, the fully unprovoked* raping of Iraq, has been facilitated by satellite TV. CNN and the like.
*being a nuisance to Israel is no reason to destroy an entire nation, according to my book.
Perhaps the issue is that Tim Berners-Lee has a fundamental belief in the goodness of humanity while ignoring the day-to-day going-ons of humanity? Or that the notion that the web has a "goal" in a meaningful sense is false except unto some vision the creator has? There's a saying: information wants to be free. Not truth. Not democracy. Information. There's a lot more falsehood or nonsense than truth. Getting at truth is incredibly difficult as a whole. People are often very bad at promoting truth because their goals/agendas/biases cloud the ability to see clearly. And of course, humans are just very bad at assessing nuance be it for risk or properly placing things in perspective in their life.
Honestly, I think the web is doing a fantastic job at exposing truth and allow [mob] democracy to function. That doesn't translate into a majority believing the truth or a democracy functioning in a fashion that betters the position of the people in it. There's no real connection between those things except in some naive view of how the world works. I think the real problem is, perhaps, Tim Berners-Lee speaking as an optimist and learning the truth.
I know some pretty smart people- electrical engineers and masters chemistry students- who buy the coolaid and doubt global warming,. So clearly IQ alone is insufficient.
Anybody who vents a conspiracy theory is a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect. Anybody who needs to wheel out George Soros to construct his conspiracy theory is a waste of carbon.
So is NYTIMES and the rest of the corporations.
Publish your own ideas on your own web server at your DSL line.
In the rest of the world, Firefox is doing well.
Not because it is so great, but because the alternatives are Google and sometimes Microsoft.
And remember: Americans also were the ones where IE was always going strong, and Firefox made the smallest dent. So not exactly the authority on sanity.
And I don't even like Mozilla. The entire What(TheFuck)WG is made up of certified mentally insane people. I know because I had a 3 hour therapy-like discussion with them and my whole family is one of (partially neuro-)psychologists.
Prevent any republican speech on the Internet, period. Its the only way to be sure.
Some more visible than others.
Those are some extreme claims. I think anyone with a net worth North of $10 million is very happy with who is in the White House.
To me it just sounds TBL regurgitates the NATO-lefty meme of "the internet is bad and the Russkies have conquered it".
In fact, the NATO elite is miffed the internet is the sand in their gears of warmongering and elite control of the plebejans.
In fact, NATO tanks were never closer to Moscow than they are now, but the NATO elite hallucinates that Russia is an increasing threat to NATO.
Our elite hates to share power with us, the people. So they have deployed their most valuable useful idiots, the NATO lefties, to pontificate about the supposed dangers of democratized information.
Our elite yearns for more war, because their life is too comfortable. They like to please the moneymen, who want to have Iran destroyed. The internet also made this much harder.
So the elite whines all the time about the supposed dangers of uncontrolled speech. They hate it. They want to control the brains of the people, it turns them on sexually to fsck with the brains of the 99 percent. If they cannot get this pleasure, they start whining.
Any time you have to use all caps and full stops after words, you've lost your argument.
To run for office they have to forever give up their license to practice law.
George Washington was a lawyer prior to being drafted into the Navy.
You let DRM in because you wanted it to be used and didn't damn well think. Well, guess what? You've just been sold another lie to distract you from what's going on.When it fails because it can be all DRM'd, you'll be sitting there being told it is someone else's fault.
You're delusoinal, mate.
And if you thought about this, like I did, you would have realized that the WWW itself is already the problem.
Luckily, with browsers being OSes in virtual machines nowadays, this fad already came full circle.
Check out jslinux. You can boot Windows 2000 in your browser and start Internet Explorer in there now. If that isn't the point to say the WWW is dead, then I don't know what is.
"Why should someone on welfare get as much of a say about society's resources as someone who is not on welfare?!"
Because if the choice is their mass death or your comfort,they'll kill you and take your shit.
He's practically dredged the swamp to put that crap in his cabinet.
It's simple. Ban phones from the internet, or create new protocols which structurally exclude phone users.
Phone users are simply too stupid to be allowed on the internet. The introduction of the iphone was the worst September since the first September. (Even though the iphone was released in July)
Even if the user themselves isn't actually dumb as a fucking rock, the simple fact that they're interacting though a touch interface rather than their usual desktop shaves off at least 40 IQ points.
Phones make you stupid or at least appear stupid, which is functionally equivalent in a world of text and images.
The iphone strap line was "This is only the beginning". Yeah it was. The beginning of the END of the fucking internet. They buy "apps" which come as base components of every desktop OS, and click on every motherfucking advert placed in front of them.
In conclusion, ban phone lusers and see the cool open internet return.
The US was created by and for lawyers, so good luck with that.
Play Command HQ online
George Washington was a lawyer prior to being drafted into the Navy.
It's fun facts like this that keep me coming back to /. . Always learning something new.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
That is interesting, but how would you resolve the following:
I grow up in an Appalachian shack, but I work all my life as a lumberjack and develop substantial wealth to establish social worth of $100,000.
Trump gets a million dollar loan from his dad after a childhood of idleness. He immediately has $1,000,000 of worth. Why is Trumps social worth ten times mine?
I die in a car crash, leaving my meth-head son $100,000 of worth. He invests it in lottery tickets and lucks out with $1,000,000. Why is his social worth ten times mine, and the same as Trumps? He then turns his wealth into $10,000,000 using a barely legal pyramid scheme. Is he now ten times as valuable as Trump, and 100 as valuable as me before I died?
I see what you're trying to get at with trying to allocate decision making to those that have proven that they make good decisions. I just think your criteria could use some work.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The libertards of Slashdot cannot conceive that these problems could be solved with legislation.
Legislate what? It's not against the law to use the internet in a way that upsets TBL's ego. This is all just TBL pooh-poohing that people are using the internet for commercial purposes. If TBL had his way then nobody without a .edu or .mil e-mail address would even be allowed to use the WWW. He wishes that the filthy unwashed masses were off his internet because he's a little bit of a crybaby to be perfectly honest. Just a whole lot of sour grapes all around.
To run for office they have to forever give up their license to practice law.
George Washington was a lawyer prior to being drafted into the Navy.
Is this one of these fake facts everybody is talking about? George Washington was a surveyor before volunteering to join the British colonial militia infantry (which is to say: Army.)
He wasn't a lawyer, wasn't drafted, and wasn't in the Navy.
I'd go ahead and disagree there.. mostly:
- Economics: Modern economics exists purely because of scarcity. Nobody really knows what the world would look like if scarcity wasn't an issue. For a rather silly analogy, consider Minecraft: The real world is kind of like survival -- you have to face challenges and collect resources in order to progress and do what you want. A scarcity-free world is more like creative -- you just have as much of everything you want and everyone can do whatever they want. Sure, some people build pretty impressive buildings and such in survival but you go to creative and find things like scale replicas of all of Westeros or the Death Star or the like. Time and creativity are the only limitations.
- Human nature: Here's the "sort of" part of my disagreement. I would say that it goes against human physiology. That is, our little monkey brains simply can't cope with infinite amounts of information. That is, our own brain power becomes the scarce resource. However, I don't think it goes against what I'm sure your definition of "human nature" is -- that is, I'm pretty sure most people would be quite happy to have free everything and just be able to do whatever the hell they wanted, again limited primarily by their own time and creativity.
Of course there's a halfway point in there. For example if hamburgers were somehow completely free, but you still had to cook them yourself (or even just put the thing together,) that's a bit of time that you could potentially pay somebody else to do for you. Obviously a hamburger is a simple case but what about building a house? You go and 3D print a few dozen wall and roof panels but someone's got to stick them together into a structure and if you don't personally have the ability or desire to do that.. well we've now opened ourselves up to a scarcity economy again (a scarcity of time) but since everything physical is free, I'm not sure what the currency would be to pay someone for their time..
Its really hard to imagine what such a world would look like though or how humans would adapt to it, since none of us have ever seen such a thing (and probably never will given that the real world is fundamentally scarce and the digital world will always, at some level, be based upon real world computers built out of real world parts and sucking up real world energy to operate.)
You were once a shining star in a long dark void. I along with others desperately hoped you would be a champion for the Web. Then the darkness spread the day you gave in to DRM. It was the you destroyed whatever you and we hoped the Web would become.
You can't make the wind then complain when it pushes you bro.
Every signal is embedded in noise; it doesn't matter the some people are awarded decision-making power when they don't deserve it—under capitalism, those fools will squander their privilege away on bad bets, distributing their decision-making power in the process, and saving society at large from their further bad choices.
Firstly, let's put aside the fact that many enormously wealthy people today (such as Trump's family) got to their position through collusion with that decidedly non-capitalist organization that we call "government". (That is to say, their wealth is not based on voluntary interaction, but rather on coercion.)
It's a perfectly valid bet for Donald Trump's father to give a loan to his son, or to bequeath to him an inheritance; Donald Trump's father amassed the right to make such an allocation of capital, so why should it be frowned upon when he does indeed make such an allocation? Society awarded him that decision-making power, and he's exercising that power according to voluntary interaction!
Had Donald Trump wasted that loan, Trump's father would have been admonished with a loss, and Donald Trump would have had a much harder time securing another loan from him or anyone else. Of course, that didn't happen; Trump managed to multiply that loan into billions of dollars over the years—Donald proved himself capable of making productive allocations of capital.
Secondly, so what if you worked yourself raw hacking down trees in Appalachia. Apparently, what society has needed much more than lumberjacking is productive management of real estate in New York, etc. That's why Trump is so much wealthier than the man of the field. Hard work does NOT matter; what matters is productive work, and it would seem that society has indicated very strongly that Donald has provided far more productive work for society than your lumberjacking.
The issue with the lottery touches both of these things.
People like to be entertained. That's why they toil away at their jobs for years, saving up, so they can spend it all traveling to watch the Superbowl in person. That's why they gamble. That's why they buy lottery tickets. These are outlets for people; it's a way for them to seek enjoyment and thrill, and to escape worry and boredom, if only for a short while; that's how they choose to allocate the capital they have amassed. That is productive; something like the lottery is productive for society, as indicated by the fact that people go to work partly to be able to buy some lottery tickets, and when someone wins, well, he may end up being a squandering playboy, or he may end up being a successful venture capitalist, just as with inheritance. Not only is this a way to give the winner (a virtual nobody) a chance at allocating a large chunk of society's resources, but all of this will have been achieved through strictly voluntary interaction.
Nothing needs to be resolved; capitalism is anti-fragile; capitalism engenders a self-reinforcing system; capitalism provides feedback loops (positive and negative) that are tied to real-world, objective resources, rather than tied to political whim or fantasy.
What he is saying is sort of like claiming books and magazines failed because of ads or self publishing. People can filter out the dross. It's not hard and there are even plugins to help.
It is also not really appropriate to claim he is the inventor of the Internet which is a combination of a huge number of things over a long period of time which evolved from long before his work to today.
I love when you use the word "libertard".
If you had actually gone to college, or studied the demographics of political parties, you would know: not only are "libertards" statistically more intelligent and have higher levels of education, but there is a causal relationship. In other words, the more educated you become, the more you tend to think "libertarded".
So think about that for a second. The smartest people are liberals. Anyone who grows smarter tends toward liberal ideas.
What does that tell you about you and your conservative ideas?
Not going with the crowd isn't exactly a sign of deficiency of intelligence.
Nothing you wrote disagrees with what I wrote.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The dangers that Tim Berner Lee describes are real. He call them gatekeepers. They are plain old monopolies. This is this classical situation when companies are taking advantage of infrastructures with decreasing marginal costs (e.g. rails). In the case of digital economy, marginal costs goes down to almost zero. That enables the creation and existence of monster sized companies with monster profits. On top of that their influence through search functions and social medias on public opinion is tremendously dangerous.
The novelty here is what Jean Tirole calls the biface markets where companies provide free services that are subsidised by other services (ads).
What (liberals) people fail to see is that all this is the very consequence of the founding principles of the Internet: a network without boundaries that refuses to regulate the service level. Or, a packet is worth another packet and that is all that count. This is dogma. This pure form of liberalism inevitably create almost pure monopolies. Only powerful authoritarian states as China are able to push back and impose their conditions.
The heart of the problem is that the real Internet governance is stopping at IP / UDP / TCP and DNS level. All the other RFC are not enforced. In a normal network, some general functions such as search (Google), directory (Facebook) would be part of the infrastructure and a common services. Communication services (chat, calls) would a real obligation of interoperability, compliance and interconnection. In a sane world, you could post on Facebook using your Google+ account maybe against a subscription.
SPAM is the other consequences of free services everywhere. No accountability for any e-mail sender that sends millions of fake e-mail. No real administration of this communication service.
By refusing to regulate and administrate on service level in the name of "innovation" we create a "winner take all" situation and let companies outgrow public authorities power's. We also create a space where abuser can cheat people using these free services. And to thank the authorities, GAFA compagnies are even "optimizing" their taxe - or to say it plainly - evading legally taxes and let the bridges and road crumble in the US.
It is true that so much has been created by this deregulation. I do not believe that was a bad thing at the beginning: liberalism is efficient usually more efficient in emerging markets. But now, part of the Internet is becoming mature enough so public authorities could put their nose back in the fray and regulate net neutrality - not at the network level but at the SERVICE level.
But this is sooo unamerican.
And many think that private sector > public sector
And we would need a worldwide consensus anyway.
Not gonna happen soon.
The guy who just said that is also the guy who fought so hard to make sure DRM got into HTML.
This guy complaining about anything freedom-related, is like Trump compaining that the EPA isn't doing enough to stop pollution, or the immigration service is making it too hard/expensive/slow for someone to become a citizen.
TBL, you're about as pro-web as Trump is pro-America.
Typical libertarian. The protocols designed by that "marxist" are the ones that allow you to freely pst your opinion here, and instead of recognizing that, you spit in his face.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
They had to stop teaching history before critical thinking.
I worked with a guy who was a real life rocket scientist (Phd) who did aeronautical calculations for Jupiter aerobraking, and who later worked with the guy who first proposed gw and he was skeptical. When I was in gifted program at my grade school, they told us to be skeptical of everything. Maybe it's an autonoatic reaction.
Typical libertarian.
ProTip: Marxists aren't the only ones who are delusional about human nature.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
*Cursive* writing is too taxing for you? Children learn this! It's not hard, and it can help you write faster, although I find an italic script with some ligatures even faster for a higher level of legibility: 1/2 print + 1/2 cursive.
He invented the trivial HTTP protocol and cribbed from SGML to creater HTML, a trivial page markup (layout) language.
Minimum viable product before the term was coined.
Its advantage over Gopher which already existed was that it could display graphic images inline whereas Gopher clients only displayed text.
Right place, right time, right price.
"Libtards" are the subset of "liberals" who don't actually understand the cocpets and are actually pushing a conservative agenda with a difefrent set of acceptable targets.
Those ones aren't terribly smart.
“The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity...” (Berners-Lee)
Advertisement in general is a scourge, because it corrupts the fundamental relationship in commerce between the purchaser of goods (the original client) and the provider.
I would be entirely in favour of outlawing ad-supported anything: mass media, mass transit, schools, highway cleanup, politics, sports, you name it. Ads are everywhere, polluting space and minds and surreptitiously transferring any control formerly held by consumers to that of corporations buying advertisement space. Such prohibition would obviously force society to create new solutions to finance certain projects and also to enable customers to pay suppliers (including anonymously and in small amounts, as it used to be routinely possible using cash), but I have no doubt that it could be done if we wanted. It would also help make people aware of the real cost of things (well, to a degree, given the way commerce works nowadays) and learn to value them (and think about their own priorities instead of jumping to grab in mid-air whatever “free” bone is thrown at them). And it would likely decrease the cost of other things by deflating reliance on massive marketing campaigns.
In other words, it would (I believe) radically change society and help restore some sanity and fairness.
how Russian and Chinese web fragmentation bring doom to these countries.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
> Its really hard to imagine what such a world would look like though or how humans would adapt to it, since none of us have ever seen such a thing
Free software.
> he digital world will always, at some level, be based upon real world computers built out of real world parts and sucking up real world energy to operate.)
Realistically, information has only value for as long it remains secret. Information-theoretic scarcity exists only for as long till the first copy is auctioned off (or stolen) and published. After that, theres no scarcity for copies, and thus no value.
The question is, why the nature of information is ignored in digital world and we have this ridiculous intellectual property nonsense. Why do we have artificial notion that *copies* have value, but the act of creating original content, where the intrinsic value truly lies, is left largely unprotected?
Is it because some sort of "human nature", an irrational Nietzschean "will to power", just for the sake of it? Or is artificial scarcity in the digital realm just a cultural meme carried over from the physical world, in "you wouldn't download a car" sense?
He also had wooden teeth.
Is this one of these fake facts everybody is talking about? George Washington was a surveyor before volunteering to join the British colonial militia infantry (which is to say: Army.)
That's just like your opinion, man.
Alternative facts are just as true as real facts, and saying they're not means you're biased fake news. Sad!
Next you'll be telling me President Trump didn't win the Medal of Honor three times in Vietnam.
Europe parades him as the creator of the internet. Anyone who knows history knows otherwise.
.. made the Internet so much worse. Clogged with crap and the dregs that used to populate AOL. Oh well, no use crying over spilt milk.
Right. But as long as they keep to Facebook and Twitter, our paths will never cross, so there is that.
Tim Berners-Lee AND Roy Fielding.
We'll make great pets
Is there a name for this anti-pattern of writing?
It's only ever journalists that use it - they attribute the quote to the speaker's role, not to their name. Anyone else would just introduce the reader to the speaker, and then use their name to identify them in the natural way.
Capitalism is voluntary interaction. That's all.
There it shows the the US is spreading social media fake information to manipulate others.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/11/17/2156237/massive-us-military-social-media-spying-archive-left-wide-open-in-aws-s3-buckets
Yeah, if you can dodge the cross fire.
The first part of the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the first part of the party of the first part shall be known in this contract...
I have to somewhat disagree with all of that. While the ideas may not be limited by scarcity, transmitting and storing those ideas is. Free software isn't "free" -- the guy who writes it is paying for it with his time, github and Sourceforge pay for their servers to host that free software via ads and the such, and so on. Now of course its much much closer to free (when dividing the author's time by all of the users) thanks to the lack of profit motive, but somebody, somewhere is still paying for it.
The question is .. we have this ridiculous intellectual property nonsense
Primarily because the people who profit the most from doing so, are also the people who write the laws making it happen. But even if we got rid of IP laws, software (and music and whatever else) would still demand some price because again, somebody has to be paying the price for turning ideas into copies.
is artificial scarcity in the digital realm just a cultural meme carried over from the physical world
Mostly this, but also partly because the digital realm is built on top of the physical realm. Servers cost money. Hosting services cost money. Internet access costs money. Electricity costs money. Somebody has to pay all for that. Frequently that somebody is actually you but just not in a form that's easily recognizable (collecting and selling your personal information, for example.)
If we get to a stage where the cost of servers and electricity is near zero (and I mean on a large scale -- like for example when an entire AWS warehouse costs near $0 to construct,) then we might be able to have a discussion about truly free information. I'm not sure that day will ever come, or whether its even a possibility (no matter how clever we get with nanobots and whatnot, there's only so many molecules on the planet and only so much surface area to construct giant server warehouses and so forth. There may simply be a fundamental limit on our ability to extract resources from the world, leaving some level of a scarcity problem in its wake.)
> transmitting and storing those ideas is. > github and Sourceforge pay for their servers > then we might be able to have a discussion about truly free information.
You mean cost of bandwidth, not cost of information as such. Typically, whoever makes-a-copy-pays-for-bandwidth are the rational schemes, not something ridiculously overpriced like a datacenter (those are expensive, though great for gatekeeping of artificial scarcity schemes).
The cost of making a copy of popular information is trivial - seeding 1:1 ratio, and your local disk storage. And because these are so trivial, people torrent stuff, to reach rational cost. It could be posited that trying to push artificial scarcity in age of near-free bandwidth is going contrary to this - a bit akin to appealing to Marxism - it's a great idea in theory, in practice market forces disagree.
I just find it amusing that inherent nature of information is pretty much marxist, and capitalism has a very tough time coping with that reality, just like marxism in the material world had a problem with capitalism inherent to markets.
You mean cost of bandwidth, not cost of information as such
No I mean the source-to-destination cost of everything -- the author's time, the hosting service they distribute from (even if that's just a reddit post saying "here's my torrent!", reddit servers aren't free either,) the ISP equipment between all of these points, your own internet and electricity bill, etc.
The cost of making a copy of popular information is trivial
Its very low yes, if you discount all of the costs mentioned above.. which a lot of people do because they aren't directly obvious as a dollar amount cost. But every ad you ignore on TPB when you're looking for that torrent for example, is paying a little bit toward the cost of TPB's servers.
trying to push artificial scarcity in age of near-free bandwidth is going contrary to this
Yes and no. The pure bandwidth is dirt cheap yes, but most of the rest of it isn't. The biggest chunk (and the most scarce aspect) is simply having good ideas in the first place -- general ideas are a dime a dozen of course but good ideas are rare and therefore valuable. The problem here is that there's a disconnect between production (true scarcity) and distribution (artificial scarcity) which publishers try to work around by subsidizing the former using the latter.
I'm not going to claim that's the only or best way to do that, and there's no question that the publishers and other middlemen add a huge layer of greed on there driving the costs up far beyond what (true) scarcity aspect deserves, but there has to be some system in place to fund the development and publishing of ideas and that's the one we've got, for better or worse.
If you think you're immune just because you don't use Facebook, Google, or Twitter... well, maybe. But more likely you just are being manipulated so deftly that you are unable to notice that you are being manipulated.
I kind-of doubt this.
And maybe you have. But you are using the web, aren't you. So maybe you are just being manipulated and you just aren't able to see it.
As a general point, people who insist "I'm so smart I can't be manipulated" are the ones who are easiest to manipulate.