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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: 2) by anotherblackhat on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:44PM
There are many things to complain about with the web, but I think the big ones are;
DNS is abused by Governments constantly, but even corporations get in on the act.
Read the history of sex.com [vice.com] for a graphic example.
Flash mobs are what turn a successful web site into a money suck that falls off the internet.
It's the main reason we have advertising (more views == more money to offset the greater cost) and hosted portals like Facebook and Youtube.
There were hundreds of video sharing sites before youtube that failed because bandwidth costs money.
Fixing those things is possible, but it's not really the web anymore... and so what?
It'll be much easier to just create a new thing then try and patch the old one.