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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.
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,
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
"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
They won't. Free stuff is more important to people than some random company somewhere knowing that they ate a salad for lunch or whatever. We might not prefer being constantly tracked, but for the vast majority of people its a minor concern, with a few exceptions (naked pictures, medical history and the such,) and vastly eclipsed by the convenience of the modern world.
Online advertising isn't really a huge issue anymore either to be honest. Sure its annoying as hell, but Google does a pretty good job of ensuring its AdSense ads aren't too invasive (maybe not a perfect job, but far better than you'd get from the government introducing an almost-certainly-broken legal restriction) and you have AdBlock/uBlock/etc to minimize much of the rest of it.
Really, the biggest problems with the internet are no longer corporate and haven't been for a while. Sure there's still some issues coming from that camp but right now politics is by far the more dangerous beast in the pit -- countries like China that wall themselves off as a way to control their populace, countries like the US that are about to intentionally break net neutrality purely to benefit a small number of large ISPs, countries like Russia that allow and even promote hackers breaking everything (you think those people just go back to a day job between US elections?)
The internet was designed to work around physical damage, and it inherently works around data damage such as copyright restrictions due to massive redundancy, but its cracks start showing when the attackers are the major gatekeepers and ISPs since they're essentially attacking their own service. Sure in theory you could create your own off-the-grid "internet" as a workaround but even if you managed to scale it up to the level of the current internet, you'd just find that you're in the same boat and would be facing the same problems. Someone is always going to be in control of the fattest pipes, and those pipes in turn control basically everything in practice, even if not in principle.
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.
Not going with the crowd isn't exactly a sign of deficiency of intelligence.
Ban all online advertising and tracking.
I wouldn't even go as far as that. Just banning all non-opted-in tracking would be good enough for me. Any tracking event Google gets can only be used if Google can prove the event comes from one of their opted-in customers. If it does, they can log it, save it forever and data-mine it to their hearts' content. But if they can't prove this link, they must delete the event from their system immediately; not save it, not correlate it, not sell it to other parties.
Google can make "consent to tracking" a condition for accessing GMail, search, maps or other services; and maybe many people would be ok with the trade-off. But Google shouldn't have the right to track anybody they feel like, blithely disregarding their wishes. The choice whether to participate to Google's data collection or not needs to belong to the person being tracked.