Happy Birthday, www!

Mr Berners-Lee's creation can be changed for the better

On March 12, 1989, a 33-year-old scientist at the Physics Research Lab of Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN, which is a European Council for Nuclear Research) put forward a project proposal for “information management”, which his boss thought “vague but exciting”. Timothy Berners-Lee thought there was a new way to “share information about accelerators and experiments”. He named it “Mesh”. By the time he had written the code, he was calling it the “World Wide Web”. Mr Berners-Lee was one among a bunch of nerdy academics who used a communication system called the Internet. People using it sent each other emails, shared files, and fought flame wars on message-boards. His big insight was that the Internet could be made a searchable, indexable store of information by “meshing” it with hypertext (text with links referencing other digital resources), and uniform resource locators (URLs). Mr Berners-Lee created a “hypertext markup language” (HTML), and wrote the first browser and web server. CERN released the code into the public domain and changed the world. The Internet was funded by America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the 1970s, as a tool for communications in the aftermath of nuclear war. When it became the www, with URLs and hyperlinks, it was transformed into a ubiquitous resource.

 

Thirty years after Sir Timothy (he was knighted in 2004 for “services to the global development of the Internet”) had his flash of inspiration, it is hard to imagine a world without the Web. It ranks up there with the printing press and internal combustion engines as an agent of disruption and change. It is hard to overestimate the difference it has made. It has destroyed multiple business models and enabled entirely new ones. Think Amazon, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, PornHub, Buzzfeed, Wikipedia, and all their clones. In our age of mobile communications, social media resources, and locational services, the Web is all-pervasive. It is used to track the migrations of whales, and to get the best prices for farm produce. It is used to access balance sheets and to shift assets across banking systems and financial markets. It is a powerful force-multiplier for distance-learning and an indispensable tool for the delivery of public services, and used by businesses to track activity along value-chains and to advertise and market products and services. It is used to monitor patients in the health care industry and by ordinary folks to keep in touch in real-time with friends and to disseminate pictures, video, and text that tells us about their lives.

Like all technology, the Web is value-neutral. It can be a force for good and can also be used for evil. It has been a huge aid to coping with disasters like tsunamis, earthquakes, train accidents and terror attacks. It has helped activists organise effective campaigns to topple oppressive regimes and to expose criminal corporations and corrupt politicians. At the same time, terrorists have used it to plan and coordinate sophisticated attacks, and live-stream them. Oppressive regimes have used it to spy on their own citizens. It is vulnerable to innumerable, ingenious new forms of fraud, and other crimes. Alongside providing access to vital information, it is also a conduit for vast amounts of disinformation that has vitiated electoral processes in many nations. It is the ultimate platform for vicious trolling and abuse and for the dissemination of multiple forms of hate speech and racism. There are real fears that it could become an oligopoly, a dystopia run by a few transnational corporations, hand-in-glove with political establishments, no matter how repressive.

Mr Berners-Lee now runs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a non-profit spearheading a global attempt to keep the Web open, with freedom of speech and equal access. His new “Contract for the Web” outlines principles to make this happen. As the creator himself has said, given how much the web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the web can't be changed for the better in the next 30. If the world gives up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed the world. The world will have failed the web.