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Now is the "battle for the soul" of the internet according to Tim Berners-Lee. It's not to late to fix the web.
Founder of the world wide web says commercialisation means the net has been 'optimised for nastiness', but collaboration and compassion can prevail
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".
"It's only a small part of the whole internet ... but the problem is that people spend a lot of time on [social media websites] because they're addictive," he says.
So money is the root of all the evil then ... Or in their case perhaps it's how they make their money. Or did it just turbo charge Greed?
Compounding the problem is monopolisation. Facebook and Google's dominance is bad for innovation and bad for the web,
I would like to see a Cern for AI, where all the top scientists come together and see whether they can make a super intelligence.
Not sure what it pays to work at CERN but I doubt it's Google and FaceMeta money. So unless all the scientist are supposed to be altruists ...
Not sure I share his optimism. It has become quite soulless, commercial/corporate, bigbrother:y and well somewhat "evil". Perhaps it's just time to slay the beast, stake it once and for all and build something new and better on its festering carcass. Too bad to save. Time to put it out of its misery?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 03, @03:46AM (6 children)
I don't like commercial control of the Internet either. But what are the alternatives?
I'd like the postal service to get with the times. Provide free email services to all citizens. Also provide good, transparent encryption. Provide each person with a personalized domain name. And run a chat service like the old ICQ. Run Lemmy servers. Maybe have Bluesky presence too.
Doing it on a national level may risk putting too much control in one place, so that if an authoritarian movement takes over the government, our services are suddenly at risk of surveillance or cancellation. Local government cooperatives seem a good approach. Really, what is the public library good for these days? Books? Not as important as Internet access! Why not revamp public libraries to provide as many of these services as practical?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03, @12:18PM (4 children)
> Why not revamp public libraries to provide as many of these services as practical?
Interesting. My initial internet access was through a local Freenet that was run on voluntary donations by some folks at the nearby state university...and the local public library system. It was dial-up back then, and you got booted off after an hour--which was a great reminder to get up and stretch--before dialing back in.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Tuesday February 03, @10:59PM (3 children)
Yes, but today they would say it was too "woke" because you didn't have to pay for it, like water, matches, gas station air pumps and more used to be free. We geezers didn't know how good we had it!
Why do the mainstream media act as if Donald Trump isn't a pathological liar with dozens of felony fraud convictions?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @12:43AM
> ... gas station air pumps and more used to be free. We geezers didn't know how good we had it!
Yes we did (well, I did anyway), Bob Dylan wrote a song about it, "... The pump don’t work, ’Cause the vandals took the handles."
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Sunday February 08, @08:59AM
In the past, nothing was ever gratis - the minor cost of those things was always included in the price, or covered by tax, or covered by small donations - but of course rent-seeking practices begun later.
After all, an air pump costs a small fraction of the weekly profits from a fuel station once and requires a trivial amount of power and rare maintenance.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 13, @06:25PM
You must be new here. Here, as in you didn't exist before free stuff disappeared. You didn't have to buy ANYTHING or pay any money for those items. It didn't matter if you didn't need gas or bought a soda, the gas was free. Same as everything else on that list, and many more.
The "free only for customers" was later.
Why do the mainstream media act as if Donald Trump isn't a pathological liar with dozens of felony fraud convictions?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03, @04:42PM
Not while the Postmaster General has the mandate to destroy the USPS