When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.
Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.
In Australia to promote his book, This is for Everyone, Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become – and how he and a community of collaborators can put the power of the web back into the hands of its users.
Berners-Lee describes his excitement in the earliest years of the web as “uncontainable”. Approaching 40 years on, a rebellion is brewing among himself and a community of like-minded activists and developers.
“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.
Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by “charlatans”.
I have a simple fix but that which is difficult by virtue of momentum of the people. Don’t visit corporate websites. Avoid google, microsoft, meta, reddit, youtube. Its much more difficult to avoid: whatsapp and maybe messenger if your family is on it. I would argue for photos and online drive, proton is good but i guess the CEO is trying to become/has become a tech bro like the others. so you have to figure out if alternatives like immich (self hosting) or other hosting providers are not fascist.
We should talk about these alternatives all the time to get them into everyday lingo such that people recommend those to others.