The inventor of the Web has criticised what his creation has become. We should pay attention, says Jason Walsh
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Image: Shutterstock via Dennis
Which websites did you visit this morning? Perhaps a newspaper. Almost certainly an e-mail portal. And what else? Social media, perhaps? The Web remains vast, an endless landscape that showcases the endlessness of human creativity and a fundamentally democratic tool that, at its best, turns each of us into publishers.
Not that that is how we experience it these days, mind you.
In spite of its democratic genius, there is no doubt that power has been centralised on the Web in recent years, with giants such as Alphabet (owner of Google), Meta Platforms (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and, most recently, TikTok (owned by Chinese company ByteDance) developing ‘platforms’ designed to entrap users via the network effect.
It works. After all, if you want to have anyone to communicate with, you need to be where the people are, and, increasingly, they are all logged in to a few websites (and apps that are nothing more than Web pages with wrappers around them, designed only to lock users in and sidestep the privacy rights recent legislation has given website visitors).
As they have grown, the Web’s behemoths have grown used not only to superprofits, but manipulating users to get them. The legal and regulatory actions that follow, mostly impotent, are now so frequent that they barely make the headlines. For example, did you read that a judge in the Netherlands has told Meta it needs to give users on apps such as Instagram and Facebook the option to see a feed that is not based on profiling?
Some Internet-based businesses – all of which not only benefit from free and open source software, but would simply not exist without the human urges to share, communicate and create – have even attempted to ensure that users have little choice but to use their services. Consider Google’s deprecation of RSS feeds, for instance.
This is a world away from the open communication and sharing envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the protocol used by the World Wide Web and the first Web browser and server while working at nuclear research lab Cern – and Berners-Lee himself has noted it.
Writing this week in The Guardian, Berners-Lee’s critique is a familiar one, but no less compelling for that. The Web today is, he says, dysfunctional. Users have lost control of their data in the face of voracious businesses and misinformation is spread in the name of higher profits. And, of course, ‘platformisation’ has resulted in users becoming the product rather than the customer.
Unlike most critics, myself included, Berners-Lee is proposing a solution in the form of Solid. Short for Social Linked Data, Solid, is a means of storing and sharing personal data that in which users store their data in personal ‘pods’ and decide who can access it, thus reversing the current model where corporations gorge themselves on our information
I have no idea if Solid will be a success. Certainly, it is not the first attempt to rethink the Web. Indeed, even before the Web we had Archie, a more structured hypertext platform that, had it attained the Web’s popularity, would have resulted in a very different experience.
Berners-Lee has also proposed artificial intelligence (AI) that is legally bound to work in the interests of its users, just as doctors and lawyers are required to work in their clients’ interests.
Whether any of this is possible is an open question. Perhaps Berners-Lee’s vision of an open Web, more good than bad, is past its sell-by date. If so, we should lament this. The value that the Web, even in its current parlous state, brings is the direct result of his original vision and we should never forget that. Its future depends on whether we, as users, want to see a return to its democratic roots or accept a world where a handful of corporations dictate the terms of our digital lives.