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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.
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,
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.
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
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.
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'
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.
"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."
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.
Any time you have to use all caps and full stops after words, you've lost your argument.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Typical libertarian.
ProTip: Marxists aren't the only ones who are delusional about human nature.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Restarting the sunni/shia war made it worth the effort. They'll be shooting each other until their oil is irrelevant.
Good job president Bush!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
“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.
It is too taxing when I can type faster on my tablet or my pc. If I happen to lose them in the apocalypse, I will study cursive. (It was me who wrote this)
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Publish your own ideas on your own web server at your DSL line.
We know how that turns out.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> 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!
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.
Yes. My point. He's not the inventor of the Internet. Marginally more so than Al Gore but still not.
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.
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.
That is a coherent reply. Nicely done.
Now, what happens when those currently possessing large amounts of capital decide that the rest of us are somehow undeserving of the opportunity to amass capital? That is, they squander half of their decision making power, but then decide that they are entitled to a do-over.
What happens when they decide that their capital is worth more than that of others? That is, they decree that Appalachian wood is worth much less than New York real-estate, and since they've amassed enough capital, they can make that decision outside the confines of the market.
I'm more anti-government than most, but you seriously have to realize that in the real world market oriented solutions only work when there is a real market. They break down when they are distorted by massive capital.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba