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posted by janrinok on Monday February 02, @11:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the TIMMEH! dept.

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?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/29/internet-inventor-tim-berners-lee-interview-battle-soul-web


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday February 04, @12:21AM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Wednesday February 04, @12:21AM (#1432461) Journal

    I, too, wondered why there was a great shift from HTTP to HTTPS. What I heard is that ISPs and other middlemen can inject ads into HTTP. If they can inject ads, they can inject other things such as malware. The move to HTTPS was to stop those injections.

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  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 13, @06:18PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Friday February 13, @06:18PM (#1433555) Homepage Journal

    Then why hasn't mcgrew.info been injected with ads? I've never seen an ad there and I check it on different computers (today a page needs to work in a phone) in different places. I think that's a lame excuse to rid the world of personal web pages; the likes of Musk or Zuckerberg stand to make too much money one their antisocial sites to have everybody spending less than twenty bucks a YEAR for a web site. They're like the old TV show "The Prisoner": "What do you want?" "We want DATA. Why did you resign?"

    The rich want you to own NOTHING, they want you to rent everything.

    --
    Why do the mainstream media act as if Donald Trump isn't a pathological liar with dozens of felony fraud convictions?