Press “Reset” for a New Internet…
“The web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas,” says Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML. He’s right, it’s time for a new Internet.
Here are some first thoughts, rough, incomplete. A beginning…
First of all: I don’t tend to overrate the past. Not everything used to be better. Quite the opposite: I’m a huge fan of innovation and technology with all its opportunities and risks. These days are incredibly exciting.
When I published my first website in 1996, I was enthusiastic about the vision of the World Wide Web and have been working with it intensively ever since.
It is my medium… or should I say, it was my medium? At some point we alienated each other. The Internet is no longer what I was on fire for…
Over the last 20 years, the web has developed in a direction that increasingly annoys me as a user…
It is (besides the “huge” problems, which manifest in power concentration, commercialization and data abuse) the “little things” in the daily use of the Internet, which show that the vision has failed…
Here are some examples of of misdevelopments from a user perspective…
- In the past, you could visit websites without having to fight your way through annoying pop-ups, chat bots and cookie notices. #disruption
- Google used to enable searches on the Internet; today the service steals content and traffic from websites. #featuredsnippets
- For a long time, data protection was hardly an issue; websites ran without cookies, scripts, and resources-robbing personalization. #privacy
- Text was the first choice to communicate on the web; today we are flooded with (mostly meaningless) images and videos #contentnoise
- “Social” platforms, on which users used to share exciting content, have become show stages for “influencers”. #mecontent
- Diversity of information, the basic idea of the Internet, is controlled by powerful gatekeepers according to what make profit and ties users #filterbubble
- Technical standards used to be developed by non-commercial organizations, which today hardly play a role anymore. #w3c
- …
The list could go on… the aspects mentioned are neither complete nor systematic. In addition, there are certainly positive developments and benefits the Internet offers.
Nevertheless, from my point of view as a user, the negative aspects now clearly predominate, so that I cannot help but fundamentally question the network in its current state.
I would like to see a (new) Internet that is consistently oriented towards the original ideas of an open and free communication space.
The original values such as openness, freedom, decentralisation and accessibility are timeless; they set the standards that today’s Internet has failed to meet for a long time…
It is not enough to change course, we should press the reset button and rethink the Internet. The future begins now!
There are enough examples of exciting initiatives…
There are also enough reasons to act…
The future of the Internet is everyone’s business! Everyone is asked to actively participate in a new, decentralized Internet for all. Back to the roots!
The future is still so much bigger than the past. (Tim Berners-Lee)
➡️ What do you think about it? Please leave a comment :-)
Exciting articles & initiatives
- NGI for an Internet of Humans (NGI4ALL | position paper) (ngi.eu)
- Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web (fastcompany.com)
- These technologists think the internet is broken. So they’re building another one (nbcnews.com)
- The internet is terrible now, and Tim Wu knows why (nbcnews.com)
- Web3 Foundation
- Internet Archive
- Guifi.net
More to come…
