title: Long Live the Web link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/long-live-the-web/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 107 created: 2010/11/23 09:25:22 created_gmt: 2010/11/23 09:25:22 comment_status: open post_name: long-live-the-web status: publish post_type: post

Long Live the Web

On the 20th anniversay of the first web page, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has quite alot to say about how things have turned out, where they could go and what might stop us from getting there in Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality, appearing in this December’s Scientific American magazine.

The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

The article is a good read, raising lots of issues that everyone who uses the web should be thinking about. If you’re not convinced it’s worth your time, check out this particularly insightful passage regarding the danger posed by “closed worlds” like Facebook or iTunes:

Some people may think that closed worlds are just fine. The worlds are easy to use and may seem to give those people what they want. But as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates. If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo