It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented.
The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.
What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?
There was the WELL, CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, all of which predated the web, and which were all commercial and proprietary services
I was on prodigy and AOL, and then the web
This thread actually shows the curse of inventing things and giving them away: some of the people who benefit from the idea think it is obvious, and some also think that you obviously should have given it away
It’s odd that if you create user-hostile products like Microsoft and Apple, you’re somehow more respected by (some) users
yes and back then remember there were a battle about how to keep the web open, so the Internet doesn't become an AOL walled garden. Now who really knows AOL.
Now days is about META/GOOGLE apps vs web standard. Just seems like the empire always wants to strike back. We techs better be on watch.
Yeah exactly, there WAS a battle back then, and it WAS won for a while
But that doesn't mean it's won forever -- the people of the NEXT generation still have to put in effort
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This thread shows the ingratitude: You didn't fix our problems for all time, in a rapidly changing world! The thing you invented and gave away only fixed it for a decade or so
Comment below:
> The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything
Memories are short; history is written and framed by interested parties
For me it is funny to remember it differently from you because I used the www much before AOL.
When I tried AOL I felt it was so closed and limited.
I understood the idea but the WWW was at the same time less professional but also free.
I was maybe around 12y or 13y when I tried AOL and by them I was using the www for maybe 3y already.
My family had zero technology knowledge and I only came to know about BBS and other stuff after was an adult and those things were not relevant or dead by then
I’ve heard it blamed for stunting France’s later adoption of the internet, because people were able to do many useful things on it and didn’t have as compelling a reason to get online to the internet as they did in other countries with no similar system.
It was decidedly non-free. The code was owned by Autodesk, and the protocol was supposed to include micro-transactions applied to all content access so that authors would always get paid.
There were quite a few, I think. It depends who you ask as to which was the leading one.
There was also Microcosm, HyperG and others. The Web was notable amongst them in avoiding money and licensing sort of stuff altogether (e.g. Xanadu made a point about micropayments for lots of content, and I think many of the others fell to the temptation of catering to cash in some way or other).
Anything with micro transactions is dead on arrival without massive disintermediation, or a revolution in the way we handle the incestuous relationship between finance, crime, and law enforcement.
You can have a world where all people are capable of trivially transacting, without having anyone else say no, and consequently, financial crime is trivial, and a nigh-intractable problem to handle. Or you have the ability to enforce sanctions, anti-money laundering, and taxation laws, financial crime is at least tractable with sufficient will, and you have the perfect abusable engine of tyranny through which people can be completed ousted from society through financial lockout or micromanagement. Almost inevitably, you will not be the one with your hand on that button.
But don't you think that today's internet already provides lockout and micromanagement without ever needing the microtransaction part?
This is actually all the talks around censorship on various platforms and random ejection from various marketplace/social system without much recourse for some (can go from being censored on any given social network, to being prevented to publish on app stores, to having your google account fully taken away).
Sure, you might still be able to access the internet, but is that relevant? What people come to do on the internet is more in relation with other people than anything else. Tech doesn't matter that much; everything ends up being built around social networks/issues.
And in the end, the internet is just a layer built on top of a physical system that is very much dependent on a given social structure/hierarchy. If that social structure wants you out, it won't make much of a difference how your internet software works.
I kind of get what you are saying, but I fail to see how a microtransaction internet would be any more tyrannical than the "real world".
I think microtransaction methods still exist using cryptocurrencies. They were going to be difficult without crypto anyway, because of the hurdles that the stubborn national authorities put up in the way of an international payment system.
I definitely would, if payments in 10s of cents was possible.
But we only get full on subscription that are at least few euros per month and those are annoying to manage and it's quite complicated to evaluate the value beforehand (unlike say a traditional magazine that you can buy as a single issue to test before subbing).
And when you find one-time payments, they are usually high price (around 3€ minimum seems to be the usual) and worse than that, you rarely can own the stuff. You purchase "access" with a license and no way to really save the thing as your own, making the whole thing a bit of a joke, and piracy the only truly sane solution.
A seamless ubiquitous interface and accounting system for penny sized transactions hasn't been introduced anywhere I am aware of.
It would need to be incredibly convenient, easy, reliable, secure, private. With flexible permissioning (subscription list, ok to pay list, etc.) so people were not hammered by "Do you want to pay?" popups all the live long day.
Gopher was the early front-runner for a hypertext system. However it was proprietary (UMN owned if, IIRC) which meant you needed a license to write a client or server that used the protocol. HTTP came along and ate its lunch.
According to Wikipedia, UMN only announced that they would charge for their implementation of Gopher. They said nothing about the protocol and its competing implementations. But this ambiguity made people a bit apprehensive and this proved costly for Gopher at a time when WWW was actively competing with them. TBL and CERN capitalized on this by unamiguously opening the standard, while the Mosaic browser became competitive with Gopher implementations.
I think it's not meant in contrast with proprietary standards, but (if you look at the book blurb) in contrast with people like Gates and Jobs. Bill Gates invented some things but is mostly known for taking his inventions, and those of others, to great commercial success. Steve Jobs never invented anything but was extremely successful at packaging existing tech into usable products people would buy.
Tim Berners-Lee on the other hand never attempted to turn the WWW into a product to sell, or make a browser company, or anything of the sort.
I also thought of it through the lens of comparing him to Marc Andreessen, who played a huge role in the open internet with Mosaic and Netscape and now sits at the far, far other end of the spectrum with his VC investments and government involvement. It's plausible that Berners-Lee could have followed a similar trajectory and notable that he has not.
Again, all of this comes from Ted Nelson. He also had philosophical antecedents, but in terms of software it was his dream of Xanadu that was the first hypertext system.
However, it’s worth pointing out that every attempt at Xanadu (under the name Xanadu) thus far has also turned out to be a fractional implementation of Nelson’s dream.
Ward Christensen always said that Xmodem was popular specifically because he didn't charge for it. (He worked at IBM, and didn't want to risk his job, so it had to be non-commercial)
I think the trend is likely to repeat on any system you care to examine.
He laments youtube comments and health-gadget data in silos and walled gardens, but this is entirely congruent with the original http client/server concept.
The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything and arguably succeeded because it could be adapted for so many different purposes.
In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
I would argue that financial incentives explain the Web's walling-off, and the inverse for email. There's just not that much money to be made, comparatively, from email.
But after some thought I'm coming around to your suggestion that the protocols were compatible with this outcome from the beginning. With email protocols, the messages themselves are sent from one system to another. With the web's protocols, the body of an HTTP request could be anything, or crucially it could be nothing. Walled gardens choose nothing. If email providers did the same, it wouldn't be email anymore.
> In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
The point of e-mail was electronic mail: instantly sending text multimedia digitally. It's not necessarily been "walled off", but I think the wide spread adoption of things like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, MSN, ICQ and even SMS all happened because e-mail wasn't really convenient enough for instantly sending multimedia digitally at the time.
Now though, it would be an interesting experiment to force all chat/messaging apps to become fancy e-mail clients for e2e encrypted e-mails that they can't access.
The Web has fared better than e-mail IMO: it's far easier to find a website than it is to find an e-mail address, and people are far likely to go to something other than e-mail for the things e-mail can do.
It's worth noting that the initial proposal for WWW (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html) was actually for a distributed/decentralized network, requiring no central authority/control:
> CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination.
As the web grew, this obviously became less and less true. But I don't think there is anything in particular in the initial ideas for WWW that locks it into a client/server model, although that's what naturally happened.
I imagine this term was used because it was before everything got centralized, so there was no need to "de-"centralize yet.
> client/server model
The original design of the WorldWideWeb application was a web browser and editor, which I think implies that anyone using it could run a server as easily as browsing other people's servers.
Edit: Not totally sure, but it does seem there was an HTTP server bundled with the browser/editor.
Email is sort-of a walled garden: I've heard running your own email server is very difficult and many providers will consider your mail as spam.
Technically it's impossible to make a service that can't be a walled garden, specifically because the walls can be legal. Today, there are laws preventing you from sharing data you have access to (e.g. DMCA, clickwrap). Without those laws, no publicly-accessible data would be walled off, because people could just scrape and redistribute it, and distribute hacks (though without those laws, less services would exist in the first place, since they would be much harder to monetize).
> I've heard running your own email server is very difficult and many providers will consider your mail as spam.
This is just another case of monopoly abuse though. Both Google and Microsoft (the two largest email providers) make it notoriously hard to deliver regular mail to their customers. Meanwhile, you still get tons of spam that makes it through their filters so they are both blocking legit mail and allowing spam to filter through at the same time.
Yes but it is more as a result of the weakness of the protocols.
It started naively as something to send message from machine to machine.
There was no real concept of an identity or a user, it only has a random name (and later domain, but that part is tied to DNS and another machine abstraction). And there is the problem that sending is "free".
Which is why spam is an impossible problem to solve. The newer messaging apps are successful because they start with what really matters in the first place: who is sending the message, in other words the identity. Sending is in theory free, but in practice you pay with your data by letting the companies running the service exploit it for ads. Since they have full control of the identities of everyone using the service, a misbehaver is quickly blocked/removed depending on faults.
I guess I must count myself lucky having lived through that optimism of the 1990ies. But perhaps those too young to really remember anything pre 9/11 have it easier to adapt to the state of the world today and I should therefore be envious?
PS: Yes, this appears a terribly unrelated to the article, but that's basically what I read: "There was this trajectory to a better world, I eagerly contributed (and this turned out huge but that's beside the point), but at some point we lost direction and now I'm just trying to find small steps in that old direction, even if the impact certainly won't repeat."
It's nice if the 90s can be mythologized as a time of optimism and reaching for a better world. That was when Jamiroquai released "Virtual Insanity", and everybody was very worried about the ozone layer and homelessness. "The world's insane, while you drink champagne, and I'm livin' in black rain," to quote I think from Body Count by Body Count. But everything's relative.
Dee Lite - I Had a Dream I Was Falling Through a Hole in the Ozone Layer
The one example of impeding ecological doom that humanity actually tackled by getting their shit together. Why did we succeed? Many ways to romanticize, but at the bottom of it is that it just wasn't that hard of a problem compared to the real toughies.
(I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers)
> (I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers)
Oh that's an interesting insight. I'd be up to hear more if you're up for sharing...
Really not that complicated, actually: even at the best of times, it's always a struggle between ideas roughly in the corner of "a better world for everybody" (positivity!) and ideas built on some form of "us vs them" (zero sum, or worse). The latter come in different colors, they can co-opt religious concepts, the idea of community anywhere between the small scale of family all the way to the large scale of nation, or even social constructs orthogonal to those such as class. Or some combination thereof. At the best of times, it's still close enough to a tie between positivity and the others.
Enter climate change: positives become a much harder sell, those can't really ignore it. But the zero sum ones (or negative sum, that difference does not really matter) remain unaffected - or in some ways even become more attractive.
the cases given for it not to be free anymore could be arguments for it actually being free, humans just dont live up to what we hoped. if there's freedoms then there are people who enjoy taking liberties. the problem is likely more the unpreparedness and unawareness of impact of new technology more than it being free to use. free to use means for anyone, including shit governments, corporations and others who dont necessarily want to get out of the thing the same as what it was intended for.
what you hope a technology will become when given away for free, and what it really becomes, thats 2 totally different things.
technology innovators should always be aware of this, and try to align the capabilities of their software to more specific and perhaps restrictive models to protect its users. rather than to give it for free and hope humans will be good with it. especially if there is an angle that will allow a single party to heavily impact its use by investments not available to others..
It is still fundamentally free, giving your data to google or facebook is a choice, a very convenient choice but there are competing platforms for everything they provide.
Governments have made every attempt to control or limit the web, but we have technologies that allow us to evade this, we have encryption, and cryptocurrency, and open source software.
Online communities of hackers still exist and thrive, way more than they did in 90s, the only difference is that the total population of the web has increased substantially, and most people choose convenience over freedom.
But for most people without the large platforms and tooling of those megacorps the internet is mostly useless.
Where would they even start without Google search?
And people come to the internet to communicate and form groups, having a gazillion website fundamentally does nothing for this goal.
Even today we can see the attempt at a decentralized network with things like Mastodon but it is never going to take in any meaningful manner, because the centralisation aspect is exactly what people are looking for. It's kind of the forums of old roman cities. You need one big one to be able to accept everyone, having a bunch of small ones spread out in the city is not only useless but also completely counterproductive.
The only real problem with the megacorps is that they figured out better and faster than the hopeless idealists what people would actually want/need. So instead of having things that could be interoperable public utilities with a focus on standards, we have the wild west of commercial competition and monetary exploitation with ads.
All of this happened/exist because the internet is a naive and lackluster protocol. Without the massive commercial investment of those companies, it would largely be useless. The reason it took off is basically only because it was free, not for real technical merit (the same thing for Linux).
The internet is like a world of a few huge Megalopolises with branches out to smaller cities followed by rural communities and then thousands of miles of natural beauty and cottages dotted about.
Parent reminds me of the city slicker in his 1 bedroom closet of a condo in one of the many sterile towers shouting how the world has been destroyed and will never be nice again.
This speaks to what should be the biggest concerns with AI. The world wide web is free as in speech and free as in beer. Because of this, it grew into the incredible tool it is today, equally beneficial for Apple computers, Apple records, and even a random apple orchard in Washington.
If monopolized like social media networks, not only will relatively few get the benefits of AI, but we might also see AI output bend to the whim of their owners. We've already seen this a few times with grok.
On the other hand you have bad faith actors like Sam Altman who pretends he really wants governments to regulate ai to protect people from it's potential risks. Maybe he also wants that but mainly he was trying to preserve openai advantage via regulatory capture.
The idea that people can expect to know the data stored about them unfortunately is a pipe dream. governments certainly have no interest in that. As a rule i assume that anything i do and write online is being recorded under my name and i act accordingly. I'm not paranoid but i am prudent. I bear in mind the possibility that one day there will be a massive leak and anyone will be able to type my name and see everything i've ever done.
Without the commercial investment and money advertising brought, the internet would still be mostly a concept and mostly useless for the vast majority of people. It would be like a convenient way to browse material, like a library connected client.
It truly took off because Google figured out the hard part of making sense of the whole.
36 years later, making the internet more widely available is still important to the rest of the world. While the U.S. is building and refurbishing nuclear power plants for AI datacenters, semiconductor process nodes have shrunk to the point where solar panels the size of a credit card can power an entire mobile device.
A 3D printer is symbolically considered the part of 4th industrial revolution- owning the "means of production" (though maybe not the supply chain). But just as the internet decentralized telecommunications and broadcast media, renewable energy has the ability to minimize coverage gaps, much like how 5G cell towers increase range.
The next step is owning the means of energy production. People are willing to pay $1100 for an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone and yet unwilling to integrate a $5 solar panel, because it is thought to be useless compared to the amount of power needed to run iOS or Android. Yet, there are other, lower power ways to send data, and an article about TCP/IP should be a reminder of that. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/a...
I'm not saying he's resting on his laurels or that we shouldn't look back towards the success stories. I'm just encouraging people to wonder what a 34 year old Tim Berners-Lee would be developing today if he were adding another component to the internet.
The tragedy of all human freedom is that inevitably humans will use that freedom to cause harm.
The web was given away for free and made public, but that only means that people get to decide whether they use it for good or ill purposes. To be honest, I don't get why he is lamenting this.
>You should own it. You should be empowered by it.
Why? Nothing in the design of web implies this. This is just a a value judgement (I don't disagree with), not something inherent to the technology. In fact the technology makes it a difficult problem to solve.
>That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
Which is the real point of the article. But that ship has already sailed. The US or China will never sell out it's corporations. And the EU and their member states is non-entity in the AI race.
Additionally it doesn't resolve the contradiction above. Freedom means the ability to use something for ill.
I heard him on a podcast recently. I wondered when the hosts will ask him about how his tech is being used to directly attack and actively destabilise his own home country (along with the rest of the world) by tech robber barons who own the biggest mouthpieces that run on his tech/idea.
But that’s not what baffles me. What baffles me is it happened in a way that it handed over the almost the complete practical control of WWW, in a very consolidated way, to just one country, which isn’t even his own home country (not that it would have been any better).
Is SOLID a data format? Or just a server that serves different formats of data through a consistent API? I've glanced through the documentation and I'm not clear on exactly what it's doing that makes it different.
Solid is a sort of poor way of doing what it wants to do. The idea is to cleave the data from the application so that the user keeps their data and offers applications access to it. But this is a naive choice, in the same way the Internet was, perhaps!
First, most data is not useful without the application that created it. One of the most ironic issues with Google Takeout is you can download data for all of your Google services but import it into almost nothing, there's a handful of nerd projects that can import some of it but most of it requires you be a programmer yourself to use. So the user really should own their data and the app needed to use it.
Second, as soon as a company-hosted app can access your data it can copy it. So keeping your data separate in a pod isn't meaningfully helpful for privacy either. If you are connecting to their servers to use an app, it can be proprietary and you can't see what it does with your data, so you can assume it isn't private anymore.
There are a lot of better implementations than Solid. But since Tim invented the Web, his implementation continues to get press on major news outlets even though it's a bad idea that's gotten no traction in over a decade.
I contribute to a project called Sandstorm where the app data is directly associated with apps you can install on the server. I think it has the best approach for a lot of reasons, both in terms of security and making it easy to use if you are not a developer.
But almost any self-hosted app platform suitably exceeds the assurances Solid can meaningfully provide.
> Cern was created in the aftermath of the second world war by the UN and European governments who identified a historic, scientific turning point that required international collaboration. It is hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like Cern allowed me to. That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
CERN’s Wikipedia page is surprisingly sparse on its history. I say that because I’m curious whether such thing like it as it’s being described here can be achieved today outside of the historical contexts that lead to efforts like CERN and DARPA (world wars, atomic bombs, etc.)
I have optimism for (emphasis) open source LLMs and maybe it’s a counter to the things he’s concerned about now. Now we can have inexpensive device, running an open source model, offline, holding a compressed version of human knowledge (some hallucinated), that adapts to the user’s needs, is ad free, has a Wikipedia level of neutrality, no tracking of the user or blocked IPs and maybe most importantly no other people within it. Some serious contraband depending on where you are in the world and a relief maybe? The organizations that produce new ones with warped bias still will have to compete with existing models that it can be eval-ed against.
The www was a fairly obvious idea that was just waiting for the right technology to power It. It would not have been possible to keep it to yourself and charge for it.
This statement reads to me to be heavily hindsight biased.
CERN wasn't exactly a place filled with idiots, yet the article even says that Tim Berners-Lee's boss thought the concept was a little eccentric and only gave in because Tim Berners-Lee fought for it.
Unless you're saying the concept is simple? In which case yes, most brilliant ideas that are hard to have are made by elegantly combining things to make a "simple" result.
The really annoying thing about those ideas is you sit there and kick yourself thinking, "that's so simple, why didn't I think of that"
There's a very different possible future where he instead went private and sold it, and I honestly have no idea how to work out how successful the web would have been in that world.
A good chunk of the web's impact is it was how easy it was to adopt, so I doubt we would have seen as much success as we do see now, as one of the bedrocks of our current ecosystem.
We might even have seen a similar situation to unix and linux, where a theoretical proprietary web that was released eventually was rewritten in an open-source format, but with lots of fragmentation of the ecosystem.
Surely hypertext and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu were well known to most people in the field by the time Berners-Lee did his work?
If Ted Nelson hadn't been so obsessed with making it pay we might have had the web sooner. Whether that would be a good thing or not is debatable though as the Internet was not available when he started.
Hypertext systems precede the web, I was using hypertext documents on CompuServe in the late 80s. It's hard to disagree given what was available at the time that putting the hypertext documents on another kind of network was a natural progression.
The world-wide web wasn't a "fairly obvious" idea at all. It only seems so in hindsight. Private networks are one thing, but a shared space offering a common, open way to host, publish, view and locate content that the entire world can participate it ?
Sure, eventually it could have happened but it may not have happened for several decades.
I'm am no history buff but several decades seems way off. A lot of the pieces were already there: addressing (FTP), hyperlink (hypertext), multi media documents, world wide network, ...
IMO his contribution is the overall architecture.
Agreed. I remember back then thinking what the fuss was all about. There already was Gopher and FTP, and connecting these two occurred at least in my mind back then, so it should have been trivial to most people :)
The important thing for it to succeed was to have a large enough group of people using the same standards. That was probably a (very) hard thing to accomplish, and perhaps Berners-Lee played a large role in that?
And yet at that time we already had a stranglehold of Compuserve and AOL. The talk was of walled gardens, safe spaces compared to the horrific wilds of the open Internet. The web broke down those walls.
This was exactly my thought when reading the article, I understand the cult to Berners-Lee as being one of "the good ones", but I don't subscribe to the idea that, if he had not given it away, the web as we know it would not exist.
I'm sure we can all think of cases where a core technology was kept private and eventually died in favor of an open version, the same would have happened here.
The article says it best "In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free"
Minitel in France, Btx in Germany and undoubtedly other system already had millions of users when the WWW was "invented", and were arguably what it was the next generation of. It was quite the improvement, but yeah, the article sounds too much like "there was nothing, then I came along and now we have the WWW, so listen to me".
Yes, that's exactly what I mean, that "walled gardens" were already thriving, so the idea that CERN could have put out yet another closed platform and would have still won the game is flawed.
I really don't follow. If something like facebook had gotten there first, your argument is that it would eventually not have been walled off? Or that there would be copies of it eventually, free ones? Isn't it more likely that had there not been a free version in the first place, we would ONLY have walled gardens?
The main innovation of the www was HTTP/HTML which brought hypermedia capabilities to content, plus using DNS (which was already known by then) to connect directly to the content host instead of needing middlemen to distribute it (like USENET)
If HTML didn't exist, would we still be in text-only ceefax/minitel style networks? Unlikely.
It was a perfect storm of hardware getting better (most people didn't even have computers capable of displaying VGA images until the early 90s!), networks getting faster and more ubiquitous and there being a gap in the market for a protocol that made us of these advancements.
So my point is if we weren't using the www, it wouldn't have taken long for some other protocol to take its place.
Maybe an apt comparison would be Amiga vs IBM PC compatible, the Amiga had better hardware, more features, etc. But the PC compatibles were open, anyone could build them, replace parts, expand them. PC won. And it wasn't even an open standard to begin with, they were IBM owned until they were reverse engineered into the PC standard we still use today. If CERN had released the www as a closed protocol, maybe we'd be talking about www-compatible today :)
> That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
Agree, and I think at this point AI development should be nationalized before it's too late. Sure, it'll move forward slower, but at least we're not explicitly launching ourselves into a future where a few CEOs will basically hold the world hostage, which we're inching closer to every day.
It’s hard for me to imagine how the current superpowers (US,China, Russia) governments will be good stewards for AI, or really anything important. I’m not saying big tech is better but with the world heading more in the direction of autocracy and fascism it scares the hell out of me for these people to control the direction of AI.
Can't answer about China nor Russia, as I'm not very familiar with how their governance works, but in countries with democracy, the government is supposed to be representative of the population (which may or may not actually be the case, it's the idea at least).
Contrast that with companies and corporations, where the basic idea is "Company makes money, our decisions should support that".
I sure know where I'd put my eggs on who could potentially run AGI best, considering the options. But I'm also a believer in democracy, and would ever prefer autocracy by a government than autocracy run by companies.
So assuming worst case (we're all be living under AGI that steers us into fascism and autocracy), I'd still rather that be under entities (supposedly) controlled by people, rather than entities under shareholders and CEOs.
> I'd still rather that be under entities (supposedly) controlled by people, rather than entities under shareholders and CEOs.
I think I felt that way most of my life until this current administration. I think I’d be more comfortable if AI nationalization (and scientific research in general) existed outside the control of the executive branch.
> I think I felt that way most of my life until this current administration.
Yeah, I understand for people who live in "faux democracies" might see this different, but luckily most of the western world has proper checks and balances, especially compared to the country where you (unfortunately) seem to live.
>but in countries with democracy, the government is supposed to be representative of the population (which may or may not actually be the case, it's the idea at least).
That you used 'supposed [to be representative]', i can only think of Switzerland where this may be true, or at the least, fairly close.
For an equally idealistic and improbable proposal about the future of the internet and personal data, I'd recommend Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future."
Did this person even read the article before commenting?
> That’s why, in 1993, I convinced my Cern managers to donate the intellectual property of the world wide web, putting it into the public domain. We gave the web away to everyone.
Before I first used the Web in 1991, I was on Usenet and of course Telnet and email-based systems, and Gopher also emerged around the same time. So the web didn't come out of nowhere, but the IP behind what we're still using, HTML and HTTP, freed from CERN's IP clutches is a good thing. Interesting that it was freed in 1993, once the momentum of the Web was becoming clear.
Might something else have emerged instead if CERN had said no? Who knows. Without the Web, the Internet itself might have stayed in its primarily research and academic domain. The rapid growth of the Web is in part what motivated the commercialization of the Internet and the "Information Superhighway", and then came the entrepeneurs and VCs, and well, here we are.
Could it have all happened based on Gopher instead? Who knows.
Technically, yes. I mean it took a lot more than just TBL’s contribution to build up to what we have today — for good or ill — but the fundamental idea that is the WWW was his.
>they let people read their articles for free? This is puzzling to me.
That's the data use consent part...which the article talked about:
>We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers
>On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising.
...hence irony. Guardian is either pay or agree to data use
Consent or pay or decline on this particular platform. Since things do have some value. You're reading an article by a human on a platform with content (exclusively?) researched and written by humans. There's a reason the guardian often has articles reaching HN where other "news" outlets do not.
Now that we have the technology - and AI is massively amplifying what PR and propaganda have always done in manipulating public opinion - maybe it’s time to finally build Ted Nelson’s web: an interconnected graph of true accountability.
isn't the fundamental reason we lost control of our data because of the design of the web? Domain name registration, IPv4 and NAT makes it difficult to serve your content.
technically if you run your own server you serve your data and you own it. People can scrape and steal/copy it, but its illegal and harder to make the bigbucks (well with the AI gray area)
But I cant easily for-dummies run a software on my computer that serves my IG/Facebook-equivalent data. Furthermore all the experts told me for decades hosting is dangerous. Its bad and the hackers are going to steal my precious bodily fluids
So of course i just let Facebook/Googphabet host it and see some ads. What harm can come of that /s
i think Tor solves all of this, but i dont really know. It feels like stuff like Solid isnt necessary
It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented.
The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.
What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?
There was the WELL, CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, all of which predated the web, and which were all commercial and proprietary services
I was on prodigy and AOL, and then the web
This thread actually shows the curse of inventing things and giving them away: some of the people who benefit from the idea think it is obvious, and some also think that you obviously should have given it away
It’s odd that if you create user-hostile products like Microsoft and Apple, you’re somehow more respected by (some) users
yes and back then remember there were a battle about how to keep the web open, so the Internet doesn't become an AOL walled garden. Now who really knows AOL.
Now days is about META/GOOGLE apps vs web standard. Just seems like the empire always wants to strike back. We techs better be on watch.
Yeah exactly, there WAS a battle back then, and it WAS won for a while
But that doesn't mean it's won forever -- the people of the NEXT generation still have to put in effort
---
This thread shows the ingratitude: You didn't fix our problems for all time, in a rapidly changing world! The thing you invented and gave away only fixed it for a decade or so
Comment below:
> The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything
Memories are short; history is written and framed by interested parties
For sure! Web attestation is the gateway through which we will close off the web, and Google's already proposed it.
You forgot Apple which cripples the web by forcing iPhones to only use WebKit.
yeah dame you IndexDB was quite a hold back. But stuff like fakeIndexedDB is what something HN crowd can do to help.
For me it is funny to remember it differently from you because I used the www much before AOL. When I tried AOL I felt it was so closed and limited. I understood the idea but the WWW was at the same time less professional but also free. I was maybe around 12y or 13y when I tried AOL and by them I was using the www for maybe 3y already.
My family had zero technology knowledge and I only came to know about BBS and other stuff after was an adult and those things were not relevant or dead by then
I think the fact that these services existed is actually the point.
If you charged for the world wide web, you would never have beaten compuserve and aol, both of which I used before the internet.
> It’s odd that if you create user-hostile products like Microsoft and Apple, you’re somehow more respected by (some) users
The respect is for the bits they get right more than anything.
Also, if you hold onto control, you maintain control. People respect control. Even when it is pervasively used against them. Perhaps more so.
If you give away control, people quickly forget and lose respect for you, for what you did. After wall, what have you done for them lately?
It isn't fair, but it is how people are wired.
People respond to today's marginal forces. Not much else.
Minitel comes to mind as a genuinely popular predecessor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
I’ve heard it blamed for stunting France’s later adoption of the internet, because people were able to do many useful things on it and didn’t have as compelling a reason to get online to the internet as they did in other countries with no similar system.
Before the WWW, the leading large-scale hypertext project was Xanadu:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
It was decidedly non-free. The code was owned by Autodesk, and the protocol was supposed to include micro-transactions applied to all content access so that authors would always get paid.
There were quite a few, I think. It depends who you ask as to which was the leading one.
There was also Microcosm, HyperG and others. The Web was notable amongst them in avoiding money and licensing sort of stuff altogether (e.g. Xanadu made a point about micropayments for lots of content, and I think many of the others fell to the temptation of catering to cash in some way or other).
Anything with micro transactions is dead on arrival without massive disintermediation, or a revolution in the way we handle the incestuous relationship between finance, crime, and law enforcement.
You can have a world where all people are capable of trivially transacting, without having anyone else say no, and consequently, financial crime is trivial, and a nigh-intractable problem to handle. Or you have the ability to enforce sanctions, anti-money laundering, and taxation laws, financial crime is at least tractable with sufficient will, and you have the perfect abusable engine of tyranny through which people can be completed ousted from society through financial lockout or micromanagement. Almost inevitably, you will not be the one with your hand on that button.
Choose wisely.
Interresting point of view.
But don't you think that today's internet already provides lockout and micromanagement without ever needing the microtransaction part?
This is actually all the talks around censorship on various platforms and random ejection from various marketplace/social system without much recourse for some (can go from being censored on any given social network, to being prevented to publish on app stores, to having your google account fully taken away).
Sure, you might still be able to access the internet, but is that relevant? What people come to do on the internet is more in relation with other people than anything else. Tech doesn't matter that much; everything ends up being built around social networks/issues.
And in the end, the internet is just a layer built on top of a physical system that is very much dependent on a given social structure/hierarchy. If that social structure wants you out, it won't make much of a difference how your internet software works.
I kind of get what you are saying, but I fail to see how a microtransaction internet would be any more tyrannical than the "real world".
In a way it was more mature in the sense of what makes the world go round.
Without money data centers and infrastructure don’t happen.
So now instead of microtransactions we get plastered with ads ad nauseam.
We the consumers are the ones who paid the infra with our monthly teleco bill.
It really doesn’t pay for the billions in infra, maintenance and personnel. You’d have to pay quite a bit more.
In my country 45.6 million homes pay each month around +30€ to have fiber to the home.
That is around 162 billion a year in cash flow.
The biggest provider operational costs are aroud 37B. For everything, not only fiber. And controls 50% of the FTTH market.
I mean is quick maths but looks like it does pay for it.
I think microtransaction methods still exist using cryptocurrencies. They were going to be difficult without crypto anyway, because of the hurdles that the stubborn national authorities put up in the way of an international payment system.
Microstransactions are a massive on iOS and android using “non-crypto” currency and have been for many years.
Micro transactions work fine. If there was any real demand on the web, browsers would incorporate them seamlessly.
But people don’t want to pay even a single cent for a 10 minute article.
I definitely would, if payments in 10s of cents was possible.
But we only get full on subscription that are at least few euros per month and those are annoying to manage and it's quite complicated to evaluate the value beforehand (unlike say a traditional magazine that you can buy as a single issue to test before subbing).
And when you find one-time payments, they are usually high price (around 3€ minimum seems to be the usual) and worse than that, you rarely can own the stuff. You purchase "access" with a license and no way to really save the thing as your own, making the whole thing a bit of a joke, and piracy the only truly sane solution.
I don't think that is true.
A seamless ubiquitous interface and accounting system for penny sized transactions hasn't been introduced anywhere I am aware of.
It would need to be incredibly convenient, easy, reliable, secure, private. With flexible permissioning (subscription list, ok to pay list, etc.) so people were not hammered by "Do you want to pay?" popups all the live long day.
Brave tries. Maybe one day this will be the solution along with Kagi.
Payment Request API is a thing and it looks kinda nice, except apparently nobody cares about it.
Gopher was the early front-runner for a hypertext system. However it was proprietary (UMN owned if, IIRC) which meant you needed a license to write a client or server that used the protocol. HTTP came along and ate its lunch.
According to Wikipedia, UMN only announced that they would charge for their implementation of Gopher. They said nothing about the protocol and its competing implementations. But this ambiguity made people a bit apprehensive and this proved costly for Gopher at a time when WWW was actively competing with them. TBL and CERN capitalized on this by unamiguously opening the standard, while the Mosaic browser became competitive with Gopher implementations.
Great article about that: https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...
I think it's not meant in contrast with proprietary standards, but (if you look at the book blurb) in contrast with people like Gates and Jobs. Bill Gates invented some things but is mostly known for taking his inventions, and those of others, to great commercial success. Steve Jobs never invented anything but was extremely successful at packaging existing tech into usable products people would buy.
Tim Berners-Lee on the other hand never attempted to turn the WWW into a product to sell, or make a browser company, or anything of the sort.
I also thought of it through the lens of comparing him to Marc Andreessen, who played a huge role in the open internet with Mosaic and Netscape and now sits at the far, far other end of the spectrum with his VC investments and government involvement. It's plausible that Berners-Lee could have followed a similar trajectory and notable that he has not.
He didn’t invent anything either, though. www is just a less-than-half implementation of Xanadu.
EDIT: To be clear, I don’t intend that as a knock against Sir Berners-Lee. But the post I’m responding to invokes a false dichotomy.
> Sir Berners-Lee
Nit: The Brits say "Sir Tim." </pedantry>
There were more systems out there, not just Xanadu.
All of which were similarly fractional implementations of Xanadu.
Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext in the 60s.
Turbo Pascal help was using hypertext. Many people were exposed to it by the 80s
Again, all of this comes from Ted Nelson. He also had philosophical antecedents, but in terms of software it was his dream of Xanadu that was the first hypertext system.
However, it’s worth pointing out that every attempt at Xanadu (under the name Xanadu) thus far has also turned out to be a fractional implementation of Nelson’s dream.
Ward Christensen always said that Xmodem was popular specifically because he didn't charge for it. (He worked at IBM, and didn't want to risk his job, so it had to be non-commercial)
I think the trend is likely to repeat on any system you care to examine.
Compuserve, Prodigy and original AOL come to mind, as places we used to hang out before WWW.
Many magazines used to have an editor note with the ID on them for online forums, regarding the articles.
CompuServe was closed/proprietary/non-"free". AOL too.
He laments youtube comments and health-gadget data in silos and walled gardens, but this is entirely congruent with the original http client/server concept.
The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything and arguably succeeded because it could be adapted for so many different purposes.
In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
I would argue that financial incentives explain the Web's walling-off, and the inverse for email. There's just not that much money to be made, comparatively, from email.
But after some thought I'm coming around to your suggestion that the protocols were compatible with this outcome from the beginning. With email protocols, the messages themselves are sent from one system to another. With the web's protocols, the body of an HTTP request could be anything, or crucially it could be nothing. Walled gardens choose nothing. If email providers did the same, it wouldn't be email anymore.
> In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
The point of e-mail was electronic mail: instantly sending text multimedia digitally. It's not necessarily been "walled off", but I think the wide spread adoption of things like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, MSN, ICQ and even SMS all happened because e-mail wasn't really convenient enough for instantly sending multimedia digitally at the time.
Now though, it would be an interesting experiment to force all chat/messaging apps to become fancy e-mail clients for e2e encrypted e-mails that they can't access.
The Web has fared better than e-mail IMO: it's far easier to find a website than it is to find an e-mail address, and people are far likely to go to something other than e-mail for the things e-mail can do.
It's worth noting that the initial proposal for WWW (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html) was actually for a distributed/decentralized network, requiring no central authority/control:
> CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination.
As the web grew, this obviously became less and less true. But I don't think there is anything in particular in the initial ideas for WWW that locks it into a client/server model, although that's what naturally happened.
> Non-Centralisation
I imagine this term was used because it was before everything got centralized, so there was no need to "de-"centralize yet.
> client/server model
The original design of the WorldWideWeb application was a web browser and editor, which I think implies that anyone using it could run a server as easily as browsing other people's servers.
Edit: Not totally sure, but it does seem there was an HTTP server bundled with the browser/editor.
How to make a WWW server (1992) - https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/...
WWW Daemon user guide - https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/...
Email is sort-of a walled garden: I've heard running your own email server is very difficult and many providers will consider your mail as spam.
Technically it's impossible to make a service that can't be a walled garden, specifically because the walls can be legal. Today, there are laws preventing you from sharing data you have access to (e.g. DMCA, clickwrap). Without those laws, no publicly-accessible data would be walled off, because people could just scrape and redistribute it, and distribute hacks (though without those laws, less services would exist in the first place, since they would be much harder to monetize).
> I've heard running your own email server is very difficult and many providers will consider your mail as spam.
This is just another case of monopoly abuse though. Both Google and Microsoft (the two largest email providers) make it notoriously hard to deliver regular mail to their customers. Meanwhile, you still get tons of spam that makes it through their filters so they are both blocking legit mail and allowing spam to filter through at the same time.
Yes but it is more as a result of the weakness of the protocols. It started naively as something to send message from machine to machine. There was no real concept of an identity or a user, it only has a random name (and later domain, but that part is tied to DNS and another machine abstraction). And there is the problem that sending is "free".
Which is why spam is an impossible problem to solve. The newer messaging apps are successful because they start with what really matters in the first place: who is sending the message, in other words the identity. Sending is in theory free, but in practice you pay with your data by letting the companies running the service exploit it for ads. Since they have full control of the identities of everyone using the service, a misbehaver is quickly blocked/removed depending on faults.
I guess I must count myself lucky having lived through that optimism of the 1990ies. But perhaps those too young to really remember anything pre 9/11 have it easier to adapt to the state of the world today and I should therefore be envious?
PS: Yes, this appears a terribly unrelated to the article, but that's basically what I read: "There was this trajectory to a better world, I eagerly contributed (and this turned out huge but that's beside the point), but at some point we lost direction and now I'm just trying to find small steps in that old direction, even if the impact certainly won't repeat."
It's nice if the 90s can be mythologized as a time of optimism and reaching for a better world. That was when Jamiroquai released "Virtual Insanity", and everybody was very worried about the ozone layer and homelessness. "The world's insane, while you drink champagne, and I'm livin' in black rain," to quote I think from Body Count by Body Count. But everything's relative.
Yeah, I was also thinking of music when I wrote that:
https://youtu.be/ZTcWojwUrfk?feature=shared
Dee Lite - I Had a Dream I Was Falling Through a Hole in the Ozone Layer
The one example of impeding ecological doom that humanity actually tackled by getting their shit together. Why did we succeed? Many ways to romanticize, but at the bottom of it is that it just wasn't that hard of a problem compared to the real toughies.
(I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers)
> (I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers)
Oh that's an interesting insight. I'd be up to hear more if you're up for sharing...
Really not that complicated, actually: even at the best of times, it's always a struggle between ideas roughly in the corner of "a better world for everybody" (positivity!) and ideas built on some form of "us vs them" (zero sum, or worse). The latter come in different colors, they can co-opt religious concepts, the idea of community anywhere between the small scale of family all the way to the large scale of nation, or even social constructs orthogonal to those such as class. Or some combination thereof. At the best of times, it's still close enough to a tie between positivity and the others.
Enter climate change: positives become a much harder sell, those can't really ignore it. But the zero sum ones (or negative sum, that difference does not really matter) remain unaffected - or in some ways even become more attractive.
The ozone worry is a weird one to point out because we were optimistic enough to fix it and should heal itself in decades.
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"I guess I must count myself lucky having lived through that optimism of the 1990ies"
The hardest for me is to grasp is that world wide free and largely uncensored communication was a singular anomaly that is never going to come back.
You're talking like you've already lost the fight. I currently have worldwide free and largely-uncensored communication.
the cases given for it not to be free anymore could be arguments for it actually being free, humans just dont live up to what we hoped. if there's freedoms then there are people who enjoy taking liberties. the problem is likely more the unpreparedness and unawareness of impact of new technology more than it being free to use. free to use means for anyone, including shit governments, corporations and others who dont necessarily want to get out of the thing the same as what it was intended for.
what you hope a technology will become when given away for free, and what it really becomes, thats 2 totally different things.
technology innovators should always be aware of this, and try to align the capabilities of their software to more specific and perhaps restrictive models to protect its users. rather than to give it for free and hope humans will be good with it. especially if there is an angle that will allow a single party to heavily impact its use by investments not available to others..
It is still fundamentally free, giving your data to google or facebook is a choice, a very convenient choice but there are competing platforms for everything they provide.
Governments have made every attempt to control or limit the web, but we have technologies that allow us to evade this, we have encryption, and cryptocurrency, and open source software.
Online communities of hackers still exist and thrive, way more than they did in 90s, the only difference is that the total population of the web has increased substantially, and most people choose convenience over freedom.
But for most people without the large platforms and tooling of those megacorps the internet is mostly useless. Where would they even start without Google search?
And people come to the internet to communicate and form groups, having a gazillion website fundamentally does nothing for this goal.
Even today we can see the attempt at a decentralized network with things like Mastodon but it is never going to take in any meaningful manner, because the centralisation aspect is exactly what people are looking for. It's kind of the forums of old roman cities. You need one big one to be able to accept everyone, having a bunch of small ones spread out in the city is not only useless but also completely counterproductive.
The only real problem with the megacorps is that they figured out better and faster than the hopeless idealists what people would actually want/need. So instead of having things that could be interoperable public utilities with a focus on standards, we have the wild west of commercial competition and monetary exploitation with ads.
All of this happened/exist because the internet is a naive and lackluster protocol. Without the massive commercial investment of those companies, it would largely be useless. The reason it took off is basically only because it was free, not for real technical merit (the same thing for Linux).
The internet is like a world of a few huge Megalopolises with branches out to smaller cities followed by rural communities and then thousands of miles of natural beauty and cottages dotted about.
Parent reminds me of the city slicker in his 1 bedroom closet of a condo in one of the many sterile towers shouting how the world has been destroyed and will never be nice again.
This speaks to what should be the biggest concerns with AI. The world wide web is free as in speech and free as in beer. Because of this, it grew into the incredible tool it is today, equally beneficial for Apple computers, Apple records, and even a random apple orchard in Washington.
If monopolized like social media networks, not only will relatively few get the benefits of AI, but we might also see AI output bend to the whim of their owners. We've already seen this a few times with grok.
On the other hand you have bad faith actors like Sam Altman who pretends he really wants governments to regulate ai to protect people from it's potential risks. Maybe he also wants that but mainly he was trying to preserve openai advantage via regulatory capture.
The idea that people can expect to know the data stored about them unfortunately is a pipe dream. governments certainly have no interest in that. As a rule i assume that anything i do and write online is being recorded under my name and i act accordingly. I'm not paranoid but i am prudent. I bear in mind the possibility that one day there will be a massive leak and anyone will be able to type my name and see everything i've ever done.
The reality is we got the web that advertising built.
Exactly.
Without the commercial investment and money advertising brought, the internet would still be mostly a concept and mostly useless for the vast majority of people. It would be like a convenient way to browse material, like a library connected client.
It truly took off because Google figured out the hard part of making sense of the whole.
36 years later, making the internet more widely available is still important to the rest of the world. While the U.S. is building and refurbishing nuclear power plants for AI datacenters, semiconductor process nodes have shrunk to the point where solar panels the size of a credit card can power an entire mobile device.
A 3D printer is symbolically considered the part of 4th industrial revolution- owning the "means of production" (though maybe not the supply chain). But just as the internet decentralized telecommunications and broadcast media, renewable energy has the ability to minimize coverage gaps, much like how 5G cell towers increase range.
The next step is owning the means of energy production. People are willing to pay $1100 for an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone and yet unwilling to integrate a $5 solar panel, because it is thought to be useless compared to the amount of power needed to run iOS or Android. Yet, there are other, lower power ways to send data, and an article about TCP/IP should be a reminder of that. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/a...
The internet in 1988 was state of the art, and yet the protocols to develop even more autarkic computing systems have still not been optimized. https://newsteve.substack.com/p/from-telegrams-to-datagrams
I'm not saying he's resting on his laurels or that we shouldn't look back towards the success stories. I'm just encouraging people to wonder what a 34 year old Tim Berners-Lee would be developing today if he were adding another component to the internet.
I think the answer is hardware, not software.
The tragedy of all human freedom is that inevitably humans will use that freedom to cause harm.
The web was given away for free and made public, but that only means that people get to decide whether they use it for good or ill purposes. To be honest, I don't get why he is lamenting this.
>You should own it. You should be empowered by it.
Why? Nothing in the design of web implies this. This is just a a value judgement (I don't disagree with), not something inherent to the technology. In fact the technology makes it a difficult problem to solve.
>That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
Which is the real point of the article. But that ship has already sailed. The US or China will never sell out it's corporations. And the EU and their member states is non-entity in the AI race.
Additionally it doesn't resolve the contradiction above. Freedom means the ability to use something for ill.
I heard him on a podcast recently. I wondered when the hosts will ask him about how his tech is being used to directly attack and actively destabilise his own home country (along with the rest of the world) by tech robber barons who own the biggest mouthpieces that run on his tech/idea.
But that’s not what baffles me. What baffles me is it happened in a way that it handed over the almost the complete practical control of WWW, in a very consolidated way, to just one country, which isn’t even his own home country (not that it would have been any better).
He created the thing and made it free. I don't think we can ask more of him.
I continue to hope that SOLID gains more traction in the future. It has great potential to enable a better future
Is SOLID a data format? Or just a server that serves different formats of data through a consistent API? I've glanced through the documentation and I'm not clear on exactly what it's doing that makes it different.
Solid is a sort of poor way of doing what it wants to do. The idea is to cleave the data from the application so that the user keeps their data and offers applications access to it. But this is a naive choice, in the same way the Internet was, perhaps!
First, most data is not useful without the application that created it. One of the most ironic issues with Google Takeout is you can download data for all of your Google services but import it into almost nothing, there's a handful of nerd projects that can import some of it but most of it requires you be a programmer yourself to use. So the user really should own their data and the app needed to use it.
Second, as soon as a company-hosted app can access your data it can copy it. So keeping your data separate in a pod isn't meaningfully helpful for privacy either. If you are connecting to their servers to use an app, it can be proprietary and you can't see what it does with your data, so you can assume it isn't private anymore.
There are a lot of better implementations than Solid. But since Tim invented the Web, his implementation continues to get press on major news outlets even though it's a bad idea that's gotten no traction in over a decade.
Don't keep us waiting, give us examples of better implementations, please ! ;)
I contribute to a project called Sandstorm where the app data is directly associated with apps you can install on the server. I think it has the best approach for a lot of reasons, both in terms of security and making it easy to use if you are not a developer.
But almost any self-hosted app platform suitably exceeds the assurances Solid can meaningfully provide.
> Cern was created in the aftermath of the second world war by the UN and European governments who identified a historic, scientific turning point that required international collaboration. It is hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like Cern allowed me to. That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
CERN’s Wikipedia page is surprisingly sparse on its history. I say that because I’m curious whether such thing like it as it’s being described here can be achieved today outside of the historical contexts that lead to efforts like CERN and DARPA (world wars, atomic bombs, etc.)
I have optimism for (emphasis) open source LLMs and maybe it’s a counter to the things he’s concerned about now. Now we can have inexpensive device, running an open source model, offline, holding a compressed version of human knowledge (some hallucinated), that adapts to the user’s needs, is ad free, has a Wikipedia level of neutrality, no tracking of the user or blocked IPs and maybe most importantly no other people within it. Some serious contraband depending on where you are in the world and a relief maybe? The organizations that produce new ones with warped bias still will have to compete with existing models that it can be eval-ed against.
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The www was a fairly obvious idea that was just waiting for the right technology to power It. It would not have been possible to keep it to yourself and charge for it.
Are you sure?
This statement reads to me to be heavily hindsight biased.
CERN wasn't exactly a place filled with idiots, yet the article even says that Tim Berners-Lee's boss thought the concept was a little eccentric and only gave in because Tim Berners-Lee fought for it.
Unless you're saying the concept is simple? In which case yes, most brilliant ideas that are hard to have are made by elegantly combining things to make a "simple" result.
The really annoying thing about those ideas is you sit there and kick yourself thinking, "that's so simple, why didn't I think of that"
There's a very different possible future where he instead went private and sold it, and I honestly have no idea how to work out how successful the web would have been in that world.
A good chunk of the web's impact is it was how easy it was to adopt, so I doubt we would have seen as much success as we do see now, as one of the bedrocks of our current ecosystem.
We might even have seen a similar situation to unix and linux, where a theoretical proprietary web that was released eventually was rewritten in an open-source format, but with lots of fragmentation of the ecosystem.
Surely hypertext and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu were well known to most people in the field by the time Berners-Lee did his work?
If Ted Nelson hadn't been so obsessed with making it pay we might have had the web sooner. Whether that would be a good thing or not is debatable though as the Internet was not available when he started.
Hypertext systems precede the web, I was using hypertext documents on CompuServe in the late 80s. It's hard to disagree given what was available at the time that putting the hypertext documents on another kind of network was a natural progression.
The world-wide web wasn't a "fairly obvious" idea at all. It only seems so in hindsight. Private networks are one thing, but a shared space offering a common, open way to host, publish, view and locate content that the entire world can participate it ?
Sure, eventually it could have happened but it may not have happened for several decades.
I'm am no history buff but several decades seems way off. A lot of the pieces were already there: addressing (FTP), hyperlink (hypertext), multi media documents, world wide network, ... IMO his contribution is the overall architecture.
Hypertext existed. Plan files existed. FTP already existed.
In fact, the only surprising feature of www is that no one bothered to include bidirectional linking, to disastrous consequence.
Agreed. I remember back then thinking what the fuss was all about. There already was Gopher and FTP, and connecting these two occurred at least in my mind back then, so it should have been trivial to most people :)
The important thing for it to succeed was to have a large enough group of people using the same standards. That was probably a (very) hard thing to accomplish, and perhaps Berners-Lee played a large role in that?
The WWW sounds like a networked version of Commodore's Amiga Guide from 1989.
And yet at that time we already had a stranglehold of Compuserve and AOL. The talk was of walled gardens, safe spaces compared to the horrific wilds of the open Internet. The web broke down those walls.
This was exactly my thought when reading the article, I understand the cult to Berners-Lee as being one of "the good ones", but I don't subscribe to the idea that, if he had not given it away, the web as we know it would not exist.
I'm sure we can all think of cases where a core technology was kept private and eventually died in favor of an open version, the same would have happened here.
The article says it best "In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free"
Minitel in France, Btx in Germany and undoubtedly other system already had millions of users when the WWW was "invented", and were arguably what it was the next generation of. It was quite the improvement, but yeah, the article sounds too much like "there was nothing, then I came along and now we have the WWW, so listen to me".
Yes, that's exactly what I mean, that "walled gardens" were already thriving, so the idea that CERN could have put out yet another closed platform and would have still won the game is flawed.
I really don't follow. If something like facebook had gotten there first, your argument is that it would eventually not have been walled off? Or that there would be copies of it eventually, free ones? Isn't it more likely that had there not been a free version in the first place, we would ONLY have walled gardens?
The main innovation of the www was HTTP/HTML which brought hypermedia capabilities to content, plus using DNS (which was already known by then) to connect directly to the content host instead of needing middlemen to distribute it (like USENET)
If HTML didn't exist, would we still be in text-only ceefax/minitel style networks? Unlikely.
It was a perfect storm of hardware getting better (most people didn't even have computers capable of displaying VGA images until the early 90s!), networks getting faster and more ubiquitous and there being a gap in the market for a protocol that made us of these advancements.
So my point is if we weren't using the www, it wouldn't have taken long for some other protocol to take its place.
Maybe an apt comparison would be Amiga vs IBM PC compatible, the Amiga had better hardware, more features, etc. But the PC compatibles were open, anyone could build them, replace parts, expand them. PC won. And it wasn't even an open standard to begin with, they were IBM owned until they were reverse engineered into the PC standard we still use today. If CERN had released the www as a closed protocol, maybe we'd be talking about www-compatible today :)
The WWW could be described as a computer version of the BBC's CEEFAX, from 1974. Indeed, CEEFAX eventually made it to the WWW itself.
> That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.
Agree, and I think at this point AI development should be nationalized before it's too late. Sure, it'll move forward slower, but at least we're not explicitly launching ourselves into a future where a few CEOs will basically hold the world hostage, which we're inching closer to every day.
It’s hard for me to imagine how the current superpowers (US,China, Russia) governments will be good stewards for AI, or really anything important. I’m not saying big tech is better but with the world heading more in the direction of autocracy and fascism it scares the hell out of me for these people to control the direction of AI.
Can't answer about China nor Russia, as I'm not very familiar with how their governance works, but in countries with democracy, the government is supposed to be representative of the population (which may or may not actually be the case, it's the idea at least).
Contrast that with companies and corporations, where the basic idea is "Company makes money, our decisions should support that".
I sure know where I'd put my eggs on who could potentially run AGI best, considering the options. But I'm also a believer in democracy, and would ever prefer autocracy by a government than autocracy run by companies.
So assuming worst case (we're all be living under AGI that steers us into fascism and autocracy), I'd still rather that be under entities (supposedly) controlled by people, rather than entities under shareholders and CEOs.
> I'd still rather that be under entities (supposedly) controlled by people, rather than entities under shareholders and CEOs.
I think I felt that way most of my life until this current administration. I think I’d be more comfortable if AI nationalization (and scientific research in general) existed outside the control of the executive branch.
> I think I felt that way most of my life until this current administration.
Yeah, I understand for people who live in "faux democracies" might see this different, but luckily most of the western world has proper checks and balances, especially compared to the country where you (unfortunately) seem to live.
>but in countries with democracy, the government is supposed to be representative of the population (which may or may not actually be the case, it's the idea at least).
That you used 'supposed [to be representative]', i can only think of Switzerland where this may be true, or at the least, fairly close.
It's interesting how this was all built with open protocols and public funding.
For an equally idealistic and improbable proposal about the future of the internet and personal data, I'd recommend Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future."
Reading theae comments is just fucking depressing. How can you ask more of Tim Berners fucking Lee. FFS.
It's not his fault that most people use the web through the lens of a few tech oligopolies. The state of the web is not his fault.
This site used to recognize its heroes, not any more apparently.
The web was truly a hyper idea!
Did this man really invent the World Wide Web all on his own?
He wrote the very first version of HTTP, the very first version of HTML, and the very first web browser, and gave them away for free (public domain)
Don't forget URL, the most important protocol of them all and the first one Tim had standardized.
Did this person even read the article before commenting?
> That’s why, in 1993, I convinced my Cern managers to donate the intellectual property of the world wide web, putting it into the public domain. We gave the web away to everyone.
Is the whole idea of CERN a public serve through research and innovation? If so, there was no non-public way to use the http/html research results.
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Before I first used the Web in 1991, I was on Usenet and of course Telnet and email-based systems, and Gopher also emerged around the same time. So the web didn't come out of nowhere, but the IP behind what we're still using, HTML and HTTP, freed from CERN's IP clutches is a good thing. Interesting that it was freed in 1993, once the momentum of the Web was becoming clear.
Might something else have emerged instead if CERN had said no? Who knows. Without the Web, the Internet itself might have stayed in its primarily research and academic domain. The rapid growth of the Web is in part what motivated the commercialization of the Internet and the "Information Superhighway", and then came the entrepeneurs and VCs, and well, here we are.
Could it have all happened based on Gopher instead? Who knows.
May I ask you how did you use Telnet back then? Was it some text-based system like BBS you connected to?
Technically, yes. I mean it took a lot more than just TBL’s contribution to build up to what we have today — for good or ill — but the fundamental idea that is the WWW was his.
He's the web developer.
THE web developer, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
> The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1993.
The core idea is small enough.
And the http protocol sits on top of the stack. Routing, dns, nat, etc all do not matter to http.
HTTP is basically “this is how you send a document over the wire”.
No, Super Tim had a trusted sidekick : Al Gore. (j/k)
It's a very poor joke, not least because it conflates the World Wide Web with the Internet ... but also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
Insofar that’s possible in general. Networking, hyperlink systems, and phone books already existed.
sounds like you want to cherry pick the good parts from the bad but its out of your hands now kid
Pretty ironic that it’s hosted on a platform with a pretty coercive consent or pay model
How can you criticize The Guardian of all places, when they let people read their articles for free? This is puzzling to me.
To me, this is an example of how someone can be very generous and people still find a way to ask for more.
>they let people read their articles for free? This is puzzling to me.
That's the data use consent part...which the article talked about:
>We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers
>On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising.
...hence irony. Guardian is either pay or agree to data use
In the UK? I can choose "reject all" after a couple of obnoxious cookie banner clicks in the EU.
This point feels like the "Yet you participate in society" meme to me. Guardian has massive reach and it's free to read.
Ooooh, you had to either consent or pay!
Which did you do? Let me guess.
Consent or pay or decline on this particular platform. Since things do have some value. You're reading an article by a human on a platform with content (exclusively?) researched and written by humans. There's a reason the guardian often has articles reaching HN where other "news" outlets do not.
I agree 100%, but I'll note in this case it's trivial to bypass the banner by blocking scripts from sourcepoint.theguardian.com.
I’m curious what you would rather have them do. Just put up a giant paywall like every other newspaper?
I’m sure they have a toggle to make some articles entirely free. This should be one of them!
Indeed. I got cookied by Google Ads and likely, many other platforms, while reading it.
Maybe use private/incognito mode on those sites.
The Guardian is one of a limited handfuls left that don’t have their content behind mandatory paywalls.
News shouldn’t be a luxury.
Now that we have the technology - and AI is massively amplifying what PR and propaganda have always done in manipulating public opinion - maybe it’s time to finally build Ted Nelson’s web: an interconnected graph of true accountability.
Ironically I cannot read the article because the telegraph wants me to pay.
isn't the fundamental reason we lost control of our data because of the design of the web? Domain name registration, IPv4 and NAT makes it difficult to serve your content.
technically if you run your own server you serve your data and you own it. People can scrape and steal/copy it, but its illegal and harder to make the bigbucks (well with the AI gray area)
But I cant easily for-dummies run a software on my computer that serves my IG/Facebook-equivalent data. Furthermore all the experts told me for decades hosting is dangerous. Its bad and the hackers are going to steal my precious bodily fluids
So of course i just let Facebook/Googphabet host it and see some ads. What harm can come of that /s
i think Tor solves all of this, but i dont really know. It feels like stuff like Solid isnt necessary