Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave an interview with radio station WBUR about the state of the Web and its future:
Berners-Lee initially imagined the web as a beautiful platform that could help us overcome national and cultural boundaries. He envisioned it would break down silos, but many people today believe the web has created silos.
And he still largely sees the potential of the web, but the web has not turned out to be the complete cyber Utopian dream he had hoped. He's particularly worried about the dark side of social media — places where he says anonymity is being used by "misogynist bullies, by nasty people who just get a kick out of being nasty."
He also identified personal data privacy, the spread of misinformation, and a lack of transparency in online political advertising as major problems with the current Web in a letter marking the World Wide Web's 28th birthday last month.
Previously: World Wide Web Turns 25 years Old
Tim Berners-Lee Proposes an Online Magna Carta
Berners-Lee on HTML 5: If It's Not on the Web, It Doesn't Exist
The First Website Went Online 25 Years Ago
Berners-Lee: World Wide Web is Spy Net
Tim Berners-Lee Just Gave us an Opening to Stop DRM in Web Standards
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @01:49PM
Absolutely agreed. And that's the point I was kind of getting at. At the time the internet was blossoming as a decentralized independent entity full of varying opinions, views, and types of people. Suggesting a handful of companies would come in and somehow convince the vast majority of join their little ring fenced and heavily controlled space would have sounded absurd. And I think it never would have happened without the unimaginable success of AOL. You needed a critical mass of people and AOL chummed the waters.