Happy Birthday World Wide Web, May Your Future Be Free, Open and Creative
“The whole point was breaking apart silos.”
- Tim Berners-Lee
This week the World Wide Web celebrated its 30th birthday. Three decades ago the web was invented to give everyone a way to create and consume content online.
The internet matured from a space characterized by closed platforms, such as AOL and CompuServe, into an open layer of infinite possibilities. Users were no longer confined to secure but restricted “walled gardens” and instead free to surf a decentralized global economy of publishers, retailers, information-sharers and any number of new industries and services born through the web’s technological revolution.
Free, open and creative. This was Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the internet.
The consolidation of power into the hands of a few monopolizing tech giants, however, was not.
Facilitating endless possibilities for collaboration and positive innovation. This was a goal for the internet.
Innovating on the acquisition and misuse of personal data was not.
Building an altogether creepy and invasive online advertising model on top of this was not.
Surveillance capitalism was not.
Spreading hate speech and fake news was not.
Centralization of the internet economy to the point of control was not.
Stifling innovation was not.
So how do we get from what is to what ought?
Many, myself included, see blockchain technology as one of the biggest symptoms of the web’s present ills. We also believe the distributed ledger technology, although still in its early days, could be one of the best paths to decentralization: re-decentralizing the web is something Tim Berners-Lee himself advocates. As I’ve written before blockchain’s scope stretches beyond merely improving back-end or infrastructure, and into creating social, economic and fundamental shifts.
In contrast with the single point of entry nodes we see today, such as Facebook, a lack of a single authority makes the system, according to Lisk academy, fairer and far more secure. This starts to present decentralization as not only more efficient and more secure, but more ethical.
These might sound like lofty ideals for blockchain and the future of the internet, but Berners-Lee was no less ambitious 30 years ago. If we have learnt anything about the evolution of technology, it is surely that it takes obstacles, iterations and mistakes to make human progress.
Blockchain still needs time. The real benefits are barely just starting to reach the surface. Crypto, blockchain and more broadly decentralization are a way to move forward past the problems caused by the current over-centralization. This isn’t just what ought to be. This will inevitably become what is and I welcome the opportunity to not just believe in this vision, but play a role in building the movement.
So Happy Birthday World Wide Web, I look forward to seeing where the next 30 years of online and blockchain evolution take us.
