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The man who invented the web says it's now dysfunctional with 'perverse' incentives
Thirty years ago, the World Wide Web was born.
But over the next 30 years, it needs to be "changed for the better," according to its inventor.
British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee laid out his vision for an information management system, which would become the World Wide Web, in March 1989. The blueprint would radically transform society as half the world's population went online in just three decades. But in a letter published Monday marking the web's 30th anniversary, Berners-Lee said he understands concerns that the internet is no longer a "force for good."
"The fight for the web is one of the most important causes of our time," Berners-Lee said.
[...]An open web has been a sticking point for Berners-Lee. From the outset, he chose to make the underlying code of the World Wide Web available to anyone without a fee.
Berners-Lee said the system has since been designed with "perverse" incentives, which he sees as the second source of dysfunction in the web today. He singled out ad-based revenue models, used by many tech giants like Google and Facebook, that reward "clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation."
[...]"Companies must do more to ensure their pursuit of short-term profit is not at the expense of human rights, democracy, scientific fact or public safety," he said in the letter Monday.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:26PM
methinks the golden age of "teh web" was when the two google dudes hocked up their lego server to the internet.
at the time mostly all webpages were statuc and if it had some cgi backend, it was fancy already.
i guess it was easy to spider those pages and database them.
nowadays, if you try to surf anonymous and google doesnt know who you are, the search results are useless at best.
not sure if spidering and parsing of mostly all dynamic webpages (the ones were the URL is a gazillion characters looong) has become too expensive (the spider has to be able to emulate all website recommended browsers) or google just doenst care about being a good non advertisment driving search engine anymore.
/me just goes to wikipedia and then hopefully a non dead and interesting foot note link.