The Creator Of The Web Says Ads Are Killing It But Design Can Save It
The internet’s problems were “created by people–and can be fixed by people,” writes Tim Berners-Lee.
This weekend the World Wide Web turned 29 years old. And in that time, it’s grown from a democratic experiment to connect the world into a finely quantified advertising machine, in which almost every link you click and video you watch is subsidized, somehow, by advertising.
To mark the occasion, Tim Berners-Lee, the man widely credited with inventing the web itself, spoke out about the problems with that model. For starters, while half of the world is online, half of the world is still without access. While the web is technically free, it tracks our every move because advertisers crave surveillance. While platforms like Facebook and Google connect us to friends and information, they control over half the world’s online ad revenue, which means independent media sites must rely on their good graces to stay afloat at all. Thanks to Instagram and Snapchat, #sponcon blurs the line between reality and commercials. Plus, in this ad-driven world, scale is ultimately what matters most, and scale begets scale. Because so much of the web points its way to Amazon affiliate links, it helps the world’s largest…
