The Web at 35: Berners Lee's baby has gone astray

Imagine watching your child grow up, being proud of watching them turn into a wonderful person that contributes greatly to society, only to see your child get to its mid twenties and fall in with the wrong crowd and start to become selfish and sometimes corrupt and even perform illegal acts. This is what happened to the technological child of Sir Tim Berners Lee.

A few days ago, we quietly witnessed the 35th birthday of the World Wide Web. Can you imagine, only 35 years ago, there were no websites at all?

Sir Tim Berners Lee was in Switzerland at the CERN institute on his flashy computer, a computer, by the way, that was created by none other than Steve Job’s new company, Next.

Tim coded a platform which he hoped to realise his online vision to encourage the 3 C’s: Collaboration, Compassion and Creativity. From his NextStation computer at CERN, he hoped that his platform would be decentralised in a way that saw no greedy corporations stifling the potential for this creativity. To realise this, he would use an approach led by a technology known as Hyper-linking. It would take you from one area of interest to the next. This technology would be comprised of his new easy to use hyper linking language, which was to be called Hypertext markup language (HTML), and it’s associated client/server protocol, we got to know as Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Tim Berners Lee could not have foreseen how the World Wide Web would shake out in the years to follow, but he has recently written a short 35th birthday greeting to the technology he created in 1989. Most of the time, when we wish our children a happy birthday, it is full of happiness and delight in their achievements. However, Berners Lee has a number of concerns about his technological offspring in his ode to the web. I believe that these findings are not misplaced.

Berners Lee wrote that the web started off creating small, localised communities, providing individual empowerment and fostering huge value. However, his child has become wayward in the last decade or so. On the 13th March, he wrote that instead of embodying these original values, the modern web has played a part in eroding them; “The centralisation of [web-based] platforms to to the AI revolution, the web serves as the foundational layer of our online ecosystem - an ecosystem that is now reshaping the geopolitical landscape, driving economic shifts and influencing the lives of people around the world”.

Berners Lee continues to say this he is concerned about how the power concentration contradicts the decentralised spirit that he originally envisioned, fighting to keep users hooked on one platform to optimise profit through passive observation of content and frivolous abuse of ones privacy.

I can’t help but feel sorry for Sir Berners Lee. His child going so wayward. The web was brought in to this world as a force for good, to grow communities, a way to disseminate knowledge in a way that could educate the masses so that powerful corporations and governments could be kept in check, rather than grow negatively, once the corporations and governments realised how it could be weaponised as a tool of greed and at worst, misinformation.