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looorg [soylentnews.org] writes:

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. To 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 [theguardian.com]

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