"These are exciting times. We are working to rebuild the Internet and need to give the surfer back control and allow many more companies to enjoy the Internet worldwide, not just a few large companies," he said at the Juniper company's NXTWORK conference held in London.
One of the guests at the plenary session of Juniper's NXTWORK conference that took place about two weeks ago in London was Tim Berners-Lee. known as the "inventor of the Internet". This is not accurate, because the Internet existed even before the 90's, but it worked then with primitive protocols. Berners-Lee needed an internal communication solution for the European particle accelerator in Sarn, and for this purpose he developed, according to Wikipedia, what is known as the "World Wide Web", the first browser, and the basic protocols and algorithms that allow the network to grow.
Now his mission is to return the Internet to its real owners - the users. Berners-Lee wants to decentralize the internet, and in order to do that, first and foremost you need to break the power of the big tech corporations and social media platforms. He calls the period at the beginning of which he wants us to be "Internet 3.0".
The Internet, according to Berners-Lee, was "invented" in 1969, when several organizations joined together and established small networks. When Berners-Lee started working as a software engineer in Switzerland in 1989, he experienced frustration with the difficulties of connecting to the network and the lack of common standards, so he had to develop such a standard.
"Everyone at Saran had their own computer. There were powerful IBM Mainframes, meaning each of them was powered by a different operating system. No file could be replaced. The documentation systems were different. Over the years, attempts have already been made to reach a basic documentation system, but it did not work because each company thought that its operating system was the best and the other companies should adapt to it," said Berners-Lee.
Simplicity as a basic rule
In the end, Berners-Lee succeeded in creating one system. "The basic rule was 'simplicity', just like the motto of this Juniper conference. Keep it as simple as possible. Thus Internet 1.0 was born. More and more academics started publishing online blogs and other information and linking them to each other, with an emphasis on the quality of the content," he said.
"With the rise of social media and search engines, everything has changed. They had special algorithms that allowed them to match the content to as many people as possible and to as many pages and websites as possible. It becomes a mess because there is more and more to deal with. This is Internet 2.0 which is concentrated and largely controlled by a small number of companies. The personal data of all of us is widely misused. Our information is no longer in our possession. It has nothing to do with the original purpose of the Internet," stated Berners-Lee.
Continue to Web 3.0
Joining various initiatives, Berners Lee wants to move from this Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, where people's data is back in their control. "In a way that suits the Internet in its current size and use, we want to return to the initial state when it comes to information and good collaborations," he added.
"An example of this is the SOLID-initiative (social linked data) in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at MIT. At the core of the initiative is the development of distributed web applications, where everyone can decide if they want to give them data - for example, weekly usage time of the application. The data is linked to the application, but this link can be deleted at any time by the data owner," he noted.
Another initiative is the Internet contract launched in early November 2018. The contract is intended for organizations that wish to commit to a fair and open Internet, and offer applications and services that respect privacy. Citizens should then commit to establishing online communities, where decent discussions will take place and the preservation of human dignity will be of paramount importance.
According to Berners-Lee, "These are exciting times. We are working to rebuild the Internet and need to give the surfer back control, and allow many more companies to enjoy the Internet worldwide, not just a few large companies," Berners-Lee concluded.
5 תגובות
Every large company monitors and embeds advertisements and plants consciousness according to interests.
Dynamic advertising (eg Facebook Pixel) has become people's profession.
Personally, I search a little less on Google, and more on Duck-Go-Go.
My browser is Brave, I recommend you try it.
Just as, if not faster than Chrome. Consumes less resources, and has a built-in ad blocker.
Successfully.
Today, the Chrome browser is also a spy, and even the Tor browser is no longer 100% private.
And the operating system itself is a spy, Windows 10, etc.
I am? This is Tim Berners-Lee who wants to "give the surfer back control", and "wants to decentralize the internet, and to do this, first and foremost, you need to break the power of the big technology corporations and social media platforms".
Well, I want to tell him: it's not going to happen. Just as you can't break the omelet and turn it back into an egg, so you can't break Facebook back into Usenet (the network of newsgroups that flourished in the 90s, before Berners Lee started with his HTTP, and was built around a highly collaborative network of servers). And I say that as one without Facebook.
There is another law of nature why nothing is going to spread as Berners Lee wants: the long tail effect: in front of some phenomenally successful people there will be a long tail of failed initiatives that no one has heard of, the so-called zipf law, which is demonstrated by the interesting guy below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
As for the actual use of information, just because they fail spectacularly at analyzing it today does not mean they won't succeed in the not-too-distant future. It is possible that in some areas (like flight and hotel pricing for example) they are already quite successful with it. To finish with a joke, which will demonstrate the potential:
A young man from Texas arrives in California, in order to advance to the "big city" and asks to be hired at a "everything under one roof" department store.
The manager asks him: "Do you have experience?"
"Of course, in Texas I was mainly involved in sales."
"Excellent, start tomorrow and I'll come at the end of the day to see how it went."
The next day the guy had a hard day's work, but he did his best.
As soon as the last customer left, the boss asked him: "Well, how many sales did you make today?"
"One".
"Just one?! Our sellers make an average of 20 to 30 sales a day! How much did this customer buy?"
"$101,237.64"
"101 thousand dollars?! What the hell did you sell him?"
"At first I sold him a hook for small fish, then a hook for medium fish and then I convinced him to also buy a hook for large fish.
Then I asked him where he was going to fish, he said the beach, so I took him to the boat department and convinced him to buy the new model. Then he said he liked it, but there was no way his Toyota Corolla would be able to carry it, so we went to the vehicle department and I sold him a Jeep Trail Blazer 4x4."
The astonished boss said: "The guy came to buy a fishing hook and you sold him a boat and a truck?"
"No, he came to buy a box of tampons for his wife, so I told him: you had a good weekend, go fishing."
Lorem Ipsum
I think you attach too much importance to the information. Look at the level of advertisements you see - do you think the advertisers really know anything about you?
I bought a refill for my pen - and now I'm flooded with advertisements for the same refill.... It will take a long time for anyone to guess what I really intend to buy.
And on the other hand - this information is the Achilles heel of Facebook and Amazon. After all - both competitors have the same information. And if not - one will look at the other's ads, and again there is no advantage.
And on the third hand - hey, now an advertisement for some good steakhouse would pop up at me...
in the night dream
It seems to me that the rules of entropy can be applied to information systems. The information "wants" to reach (and will eventually reach) the state with the maximum entropy. Since information is "sticky", like matter that is affected by gravity, and creates galaxies, stars and black holes, then the knowledge will also go out of the control of the individual and accumulate in larger and larger chunks with interested parties, such as Facebook, Amazon, the credit card companies, the Shas party, the neighborhood grocer and others. No.
Tim Berners-Lee, who is a nice guy, who once solved a problem and many people liked the solution, will not be able to extract the personal information that Amazon's speaker customers stream to the servers (very stupidly), just as he will not be able to extract the spaceship "Titanic 17" from the black hole it was swallowed by on its journey Her debut in the 24th century.