Tim Berners-Lee Says World Wide Web Must Emerge From 'Adolescence' (venturebeat.com)

The fraying World Wide Web needs to rediscover its strengths and grow into maturity, its designer Tim Berners-Lee said on Monday, marking the 30th anniversary of the collaborative software project his supervisor initially dubbed "vague but exciting." From a report: Speaking to reporters at CERN, the physics research center outside Geneva where he invented the web, Berners-Lee said users of the web had found it "not so pretty" recently. "They are all stepping back, suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections, realizing that this web thing that they thought was that cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well," he said. "It seems we don't finish reeling from one privacy disaster before moving onto the next one," he added, citing concerns about whether social networks were supporting democracy. People who had grown up taking the internet's neutrality for granted now found that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump had "rolled that back."

Comments

Oh, I thought he could be above this...

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's something particularly chilling, technologists thinking their task is to "solve" politics is pretty high on the list. (Among politicians and politically motivated public commentators the parallel approach is to claim their political stance is pure scientific truth without a whiff of political stance.) My personal take on such approaches is that the cure may be more dangerous than the problem that has been framed to be the problem.

Politics is politics. There are no solutions that turn it into something else. Or at least solutions that would really fix it, but there are plenty of "solutions" which break things that actually work as a side effect, while mostly replacing the problem with another, trendier problem...

The US and UK

[AHuxley]

voted for the politics they wanted and for the UK to exit the EU.
Humanity enjoys the freedom to vote.

Re:The US and UK

[totallyarb]

The UK didn't vote for Brexit

Factually untrue. There was a referendum, and more people voted to leave than remain.

the majority didn't vote

Also factually untrue. Turnout was 72.2% - which is higher than turnout at any US Presidential election since 1900. Are those all invalid too?

Putin's illegal propaganda funding

...is a convenient excuse for people who want to ignore the result. How little do you think of the people of Britain that you think that the activities of a few trolls on the internet are enough to decisively swing the result?

stop Brexit with a real vote

What do you define as a REAL vote? Do you seriously think that a second referendum would magically be "cleaner" than the first one? I don't think you do. I think you just want to keep asking the question until you get the answer you want, and democracy be damned.

For what it's worth, I voted Remain. I think leaving the EU is a terrible decision. But the precedent that would be set by ignoring the expressed will of the public because you don't like the result is more frightening to me than the worst chaos Brexit might bring.

Web teen angst

[magarity]

Tim Berners-Lee: World Wide Web, you must emerge from adolescence
WWW: I didn't ask to be born!
Tim Berners-Lee: ...
WWW: You're not my real parent anyways!

Disconnected

[macraig]

Berners-Lee is so fully disconnected from reality now that he's no longer credible. He talks about the Web "saving humanity", yet he has personally participated in crafting standards for it that serve corporate interests rather than the rest of us. Under his "guidance", the Web has transitioned from a network where people participated in its development and had control over how they consumed it to one where they no longer participate, have no control, and have become passive consumers. Corporate Web developers now view their target "useless eater" audiences with the same disregard as eugenicists of the last century.

He's lamenting his own utter failure to guide his own creation in the way that he claims he really wanted it to progress, while doing the precise opposite? What a bloody hypocrite.

Re:This is, frankly, sickening

[rmdingler]

TBL is not the old man yelling at the cloud. He's a highly intelligent person who cannot believe, with all this internet-provided freedom of information, people still make such ignorant decisions. Common failure of the reasonably well educated.