What a difference 30 years make. To mark three decades since he submitted his Internet proposal, Sir Tim Berners-Lee says that global action is required to tackle the web’s ‘downward plunge to a dysfunctional future’.
Sir Tim has identified three main areas of dysfunction today: ‘Deliberate, malicious intent’ (such as State-sponsored hacking and online harassment), ‘System design that creates perverse incentives’ (such as clickbait), and ‘Unintended negative consequences’ (such as polarised online discussions). Who of us could really disagree with such a diagnosis? These flaws are all too commonly felt by ordinary users.
Regulation remedy?
Sir Tim’s cure for these three diseases is to create new laws based on a ‘contract for the web’ with governments, then translating this contract into laws and regulations for our digital age. What is very striking about these proposals is how different they are to the ‘open web’ ideology that underpinned the web’s conception. At the time, the early web community that birthed the Internet was driven by revolutionary ideas like decentralisation, universality, bottom-up design, and consensus. The Homebrew Computer Club – a group of digital inventors in the US, that included Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Steve Wozniak (Apple) – was deeply influenced by the West Coast radical student movement which eschewed control and laws. The narrative from the early days was clear: liberate the computer from control and regulation and it will thrive.
