The World Wide Web is 28 years old. But these days it often appears to have the growing pains of a teenager. There\u2019s the scourge of fake news, growing pockets of censorship around the world, the fiery debate over net neutrality and more.<\/p>\n
When teens get into trouble, you typically talk to the parents. As it happens, I had the opportunity last week to interview Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who was working for the European research organization CERN back in 1989 when he proposed the idea of using a tool called a web browser to visit distinct pages on the internet, each with an individual domain name and connected via a network of hyperlinks.<\/p>\n
A few years later, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web consortium, or W3C, to bring companies and developers together to solve problems and create new technical standards. Berners-Lee and I spoke on stage last Wednesday at the end of one of the W3C\u2019s regular plenary meetings, and things got interesting, fast.<\/p>\n
I started out by asking him if he occasionally felt like Dr. Frankenstein, wondering, \u201cWhat have I wrought?\u201d while watching the unfolding saga of fake news on the web and its implications for democracies. \u201cYeah, I have,\u201d he replied. His concerns during the web\u2019s first 25 years focused on expanding access to more people. But now he thinks the web has become as complex and intricate as a human brain\u2014so the tech industry requires a multi-disciplinary approach to \u201clook out for unintended consequences\u201d and study the impact of services as they are introduced to the world. The big tech companies, he said, \u201cneed to find engineers and people of all kinds of disciplines who can help you figure out and simulate what will happen if you turn these systems on.\u201d<\/p>\n
But too often web companies just plow ahead without understanding the consequences. He criticized the likes of Google, Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. for creating advertising systems that, for example, incentivized fake-news purveyors in Veles, Macedonia, \u201cwho learned that if you tweet something which is wrong, and put an article with a fake headline on your site, you will get more clicks and more ad revenue.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t do that out of malice,\u201d Berners-Lee said. \u201cThey did it completely commercially, not even caring about who won the election. \u2026 But Google gave them money [to do it], and that trained them to think of headlines like, \u2018Hillary really wants Trump to win.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
I also asked Berners-Lee if he was worried that big tech companies have too much power. He said the giants of the past, like AT&T Inc., AOL and Microsoft Corp., were once considered unassailable, only to be upended by unexpected competitors: \u201cIt\u2019s amazing how quickly people can pick stuff up on the internet; it\u2019s also amazing how quickly they can drop it,\u201d he said. That said, he worries that \u201cyou can\u2019t imagine having such a strong dominance in these markets without losing out on innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turning abroad, we discussed efforts to censor internet content. Early in the web\u2019s history, there was a belief that \u201cinformation wants to be free\u201d\u2014that internet users would find ways to route around attempts at censorship. Berners-Lee conceded that thinking was a \u201ca bit simplistic.\u201d He says there\u2019s \u201cno magic recipe that the internet will be able to solve censorship, so censorship is something we have to protest against.\u201d Obliquely referencing countries that restrict internet content\u2014there were attendees from China in the audience\u2014he said, \u201cOpenness is a sign of a strong government. You can be strong in lots of different ways. The ability to be strong enough to allow people to see the alternative views of the opposition is a particular strength which I hope various countries will find.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another thing weighing on Berners-Lee\u2019s mind is net neutrality. The Trump administration\u2019s Federal Communications Commission, lead by Ajit Pai, has pledged to throw out Obama-era rules mandating that all content on the internet must be treated equally by telcos. Berners-Lee is heading to Washington soon to lobby and protest against the change and said that America\u2019s tech leadership is at stake if we don\u2019t preserve the separation between content creators and telecommunication companies.<\/p>\n
Toward the end of the chat, Berners-Lee said it was important for people to be able to own and control their own data and that companies should think twice before assuming it\u2019s a business asset. \u201cIt used to be said that data is the new oil,\u201d he said. \u201cPersonally, I think it\u2019s like nuclear fuel. It\u2019s becoming toxic. Two years ago, the question from the board was, \u2018How are we monetizing the data?\u2019 Now the question is, \u201cHow are we protecting ourselves from the damage of this getting out?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
I asked Berners-Lee if he owned a connected assistant like the Amazon Echo or Google Home. The answer, he said, is no; he believes that when conversations and queries are recorded in our home and transferred to the cloud, they inevitably become vulnerable to intruders and accessible to prying governments. Sounding very unlike the web pioneer who created the web nearly three decades ago, he vowed, \u201cWe must resist these technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n
And here\u2019s what you need to know in global technology news
\nUber approved SoftBank\u2019s offer to invest billions. Over the weekend, the ride-hailing company took a major step toward raising new capital and allowing shareholders to cash out in a deal of as much as $10 billion. It could certainly benefit from a new ally. Competitors are nipping at Uber\u2019s heels, especially Lyft, which is spending aggressively in the U.S.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s consumer holiday set a new record. The annual event known as Singles\u2019 Day generated $25 billion in sales for Alibaba, which processed 256,000 transactions per second at peak times. The results surprised analysts and defied concerns of an economic slowdown.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s rancor inside the Puzzle Palace. According to a report in the New York Times, the mysterious theft of computer infiltration tools from the National Security Agency has helped sow cyber-chaos around the world and create havoc inside the agency itself.<\/p>\n
Air leaked from the bitcoin bubble, as the price of the cryptocurrency dropped 29 percent over a week. Supporters of a controversial upgrade, which was recently cancelled, are apparently dumping their bitcoin holdings and investing in an alternative called Bitcoin Cash.<\/p>\n
The World Wide Web is 28 years old, but these days it often appears to have the growing pains of a teenager. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":98216,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[47256,917,14365],"class_list":["post-237360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-creator","tag-internet-2","tag-world-wide-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237360"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":237366,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237360\/revisions\/237366"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}