The Inventor of the World Wide Web Says the Internet Is Broken
And he plans to build a new one
In 1988, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented hypertext mark-up language (html) — the language that powers the World Wide Web. He knew his invention could facilitate the rapid exchange of information globally and felt it would be a powerful force for good. That’s how it was for a while, but it didn’t take long for his invention to be hijacked, as he sees it, by a few dozen corporations.
In the intervening years, the number of these corporations dwindled due to amalgamations and takeovers, and those that survived became huge. Berners-Lee points out that between them, these giant corporations dominate today’s internet by providing email, web, social communication, navigational, and other services ostensibly free of charge. Users, however, “pay” by giving these huge companies enormous amounts of personal information. The companies sell restricted access to selected parts of it to marketing organizations enabling them to target advertisements at those same users.
In addition to advertising, the big companies exploit their vast data banks for a myriad of projects. Some of these projects may benefit humanity, but crucially their sole product remains user data. Not only do users have no control over how their data is used, but despite what many…
