
Tim Berners-Lee: 'Stop web's downward plunge to dysfunctional future' - pmoriarty
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47524474
======
nicpottier
Tim's letter: [https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-
birthday-30/](https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/)

I actually thought it was pretty carefully worded and not super alarmist
(despite the BBC headline).

I personally think it is worse than he presents it. Perhaps it is just
nostalgia, but today's web / internet seems to have given up on open standards
and cooperation. Instead most of the money and effort is going into figuring
out how to capture people in a walled garden such as Facebook etc.. so you can
mine their data and advertise to them.

For all its downsides, Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can
remember that has done well and maybe has a future.

We seem to have failed as a community to solve chat with an open standard
(that has broken out enough to win), which is a serious shame. That's a hugely
important medium today and we have essentially handed that to WhatsApp /
Facebook / whoever. Imagine if we had done the same with email or the web
itself.

I wonder if it is just a cultural difference somehow. The Stalman's of the
world seem farther and farther apart, or perhaps just the internet has become
so monetized that the best talent just can't refuse the $$$s from a FANG job
that focuses on crushing the competition and owning everything.

I don't know, but it makes me sad.

~~~
mikekchar
Every once in a while I feel the same way. It's hard to reply to this
sentiment, though, because I think there is also a lot of wishful thinking
mixed in.

Years ago, standards processes were as much about screwing your competition as
it was about cooperation. Take the telephone protocol standards. They are
open, but the idea was always to rush an implementation that was different
from your competition, push through that implementation in the standards
committee and then force your competition to rewrite their code. The early
days of web "standards" went that way as well (as I'm sure many people will
remember).

However, the other thing to keep in mind is that proprietary solutions
designed to force customers into vendor lock-in has _always_ been the dominant
situation. In fact, things are dramatically _better_ than they were ages ago.

Things like TCP/IP were _not_ the solutions that the big vendors wanted. They
wanted their walled gardens (and worked hard to produce them). Even HTTP and
the web only became popular because of NCSA Mosaic, which was proprietary
software. It's also interesting to see the list of original licencees [1] The
only company that currently exists is Fujitsu. Netscape Navigator was written
by many of the same authors as Mosaic and they only decided to open source it
in 1998 -- a move that literally shocked the development world. This
eventually led to Mozilla.

Back in the day, people "in the know" knew about free software, the FSF,
Emacs, Vi/Vim, Posix, etc, etc. The average programmer knew nothing about it,
except for being forced to learn vi in university perhaps. These days, you
can't swing a cat without hitting someone who is passionate about at least
open source, even if they don't necessarily quite understand software freedom.

I don't think we are in a worse position than we used to be. Granted, there
are more and more users (billions now) that don't know anything about free and
open systems. 30 or 40 years ago, those people were similarly ignorant, but
weren't using computers. So when your aunt Martha is hooked up to Facebook, it
seems like we've lost (or at least are loosing). But these open platforms and
protocols have _always_ been niche and our niche is _much_ bigger than it was
before. While you may never be able to chat with your aunt Martha with a free
and open system run by people who are more interested in providing a service
than somehow extracting money from you, you _can_ chat with a _lot_ more
people than you ever could before. I think the key thing to remember is that
you've _never_ been able to chat with your aunt Martha using that free and
open system.

I think it is perfectly acceptable (and probably even preferable) to turn
inward and mostly ignore what's happening in the proprietary world. I think
it's probably a good idea, at least for now, to ignore fashion and popularity
and instead concentrate on building free and open applications that work the
way you want. There are more than enough people around with the same ideals to
make it work.

If you build it, they might not come, but if you don't build it, they
definitely will not come.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_\(web_browser\))

~~~
dasyatidprime
When aunt Martha and uncle Martin weren't using the free and open system, but
also weren't using computers to talk to people regularly, the social pressure,
if you wanted to stay in touch with them, was toward more physical means: in-
person visits, mail, and telephones, which, while definitely technological in
nature, have more physicality than the currently-dominant digital world.

People have more of an instinctive understanding of what “open” means in terms
of the physical world. You don't meet them at Facebook Square, where every
word you say to them goes through corporate-controlled smart air; you might
meet them at their house, or at some public or commercial place, and when
you're in public, you're both being continously reminded of this through
physical environmental cues. The mail is often a monopoly, but its function is
circumscribed, and opening your envelopes without a really good reason is at
least a clear violation of social norms; the physical object provides a
boundary. Telephones don't usually manipulate the context of what you say
during calls, and while the mass surveillance issue is hazier there, the basic
model of social expectation is still simple. (The simplicity of model applies
to a lesser extent to IM, but telephones currently have universal interop in a
way that got shattered for e.g. XMPP by a whole storm of issues, and the
subscription funding model for the infrastructure has social acceptance that
it doesn't in the IM world. I don't have a short history of why this is right
now.)

Nowadays, it's likely that the social pressure is for you to actively use the
closed system, because that's what your aunt and uncle have reoriented their
habits toward after finding that it felt so much more convenient and took so
much pressure off them. Which is arguably one of the good effects—though other
people have written uneasily about how this is in a way the outsourcing of
emotional labor to machines. But because digital social networking is
intermediated so much more deeply than earlier and simpler forms of
telecommunication, whoever controls the software now has hard influence over
the form those habits take, and your aunt and uncle's need to not have a big
chunk of their social life disrupted, combined with the relative non-
_manipulability_ of the digital world to people who don't fall into the
“programmers with a lot of free time who are willing and able to flout TOSes
and/or evade detection” class, means they can't easily resist it. The
resultant inertia is very asymmetrical in a way that I don't think it was for
previous means of socialization. It's also _fast_ in a way that it wasn't
before: governments can crack down on things in oppressive ways or manipulate
and infiltrate people's social networks, but it's harder to do en masse, and
the actions in question have to be more visible to have an effect, so
grassroots opposition has more margin to get started. Nowadays, I see people
saying that they feel like planning their activism on Facebook is the only way
to get any reach.

Then you get how a lot of people's working understanding of computer
technology is based on a fuzzy notion of “computers” and “the Internet” which
mushes everything together, so whatever decides which models of interaction
are fashionable can force you to follow them or be in the dreaded
“inaccessible to users because of lack of familiarity” weak position, which
just gets reduced to “not easy to use”, and then you die. Compare how Mastodon
is basically a Twitter clone on many levels, and that's seemingly what wound
up taking off among less distinctly-in-the-know users in the ActivityPub
sphere, and _even then_ merely introducing the idea of “instances” seems to
have taken a lot of social doing.

So I think we _are_ in a worse position than we used to be, both because
getting traction on “move from physical world to open, benevolent digital” is
harder than “move from closed, manipulative digital to open, benevolent
digital” and because the closed, manipulative digital now has a lot more ways
to close off the terrain before you can get anywhere.

… I seriously need to compose my thoughts on this into something more coherent
and well-researched at some point.

~~~
mikekchar
I had to think a lot about what you are saying. I think I agree. The world is
in a worse place overall than it was before with respect to freedom. The
warnings that people like RMS made have come true. However, I still think that
doesn't invalidate the idea that freedom in in a better position than it was
before as well. It's just that non-freedom is growing at a faster pace.

Now that I think about it, though, there is definitely one place where we are
losing. It used to be, despite the lack of popularity, free-as-in-freedom
software was by and large _better_ than other software you could get. GNU was
much, much better than the proprietary Un*x collection of user land tools.
Linux was much better than the proprietary Posix kernels (though you can argue
whether or not BSD was better, it doesn't matter since it is also free-as-in-
freedom). Development tools were much better and when we talk about compilers,
interpreters, reuse libraries and frameworks, this (at least) has accelerated.
Even going later on, Asterisk was head an shoulders better than any
proprietary PBX (not that it's saying much). I would even argue that IRC and
Jabber, et al were dramatically better than the proprietary offerings. But
especially in this kind of telecommunications field, we've been overtaken.

I'm not sure if making a better X will promote adoption of "free X", but I'm
sure that allowing the proprietary gang to own all of the high quality
software in the area will result in "free X" always being an impossible dream.
In telecommunications, I personally think there is nothing (with the possible
exception of Mastodon) that's even close to the proprietary competition at the
moment. That's a massive problem. I would concentrate on fixing that before I
tried to do anything else.

~~~
dasyatidprime
But what _is_ “high quality software”, if we look at it from a perspective of
user expectation? There are a lot of things users expect now that are not just
a function of the software itself. And how do you organize the people to
produce the software? I think the volunteer model that powered a lot of the
IRC and Jabber era you mentioned is both decaying and under attack in terms of
viability for mainstream end-users.

One psychological element is that I suspect the “service = client = identity =
interaction model” meta-model of mental compartmentalization has been embedded
firmly into mainstream end-user consciousness, because it's easy to understand
and provides strong environmental cues. This is both encouraged and to some
degree _enforced_ by the “Does It Work On Mobile” situation, which implies
dealing with Google or Apple app stores. Notification handling seems
particularly awful, because it usually means going through an app-specific
developer account which is required to be responsible for a forwarding server,
which then becomes both a recurring financial expense and a centralized point
of attack, and so on.

OS-level, user-level, and security-apocalypse-related requirements for fast-
paced updates destroy anyone following the “make something acceptable and then
leave it be for a while” development model, which drives the effective cost
and need for commitment way up. In the dominant IRC/Jabber era, clients could
have code that didn't get touched for a long time, which is much more amenable
to a volunteer model.

Non-volunteer libre software models run into all the usual market and funding
problems, but both they and volunteer models _also_ run into the problem of
being exploitable via the newest iterations of embrace-extend-extinguish,
which I guess I'd call copy-customize-clobber. Marketing departments are both
ethically Interesting and a massive money sink. Taking money at all at least
used to involve huge logistical concerns (which themselves have centralizing
effects), though some of this has become easier.

The pricing gradient is abysmal. Much like how the iOS App Store has had its
pricing driven to rock-bottom by price anchoring on “things that got added
onto your phone bill” even though the new crop of apps was full-fledged
polished packages that cost much more to make, the anchoring expectation for
keeping a new service running (and its client maintained, and so forth) has
been driven to “free” by VC-backed data-driven operations providing a very
strong distorted market signal to that effect (I say “distorted” under the
assumption that users don't realize the full scope of the mass surveillance
and control that is possible with digital socialization and aren't taking it
into account, but in either case it hurts the open options).

A lot of the polishing of end-user-facing software involves slogs, and some of
them involve money-draining and executive-function-draining slogs. “This
doesn't work on Android device Foo” is something that is very hard to fix
without having a Foo on your desk. Users, frankly, can also be quite
ungrateful in an open-source development context (keeping in mind that whether
this reflects badly on them is a separate question, given the amount of hidden
psychological distance involved and the social context of other unfortunate
power exchanges that they're pushed into by digital technology). In a
corporate context this is mitigated by social barriers and financial
compensation, but avoiding maintainer burnout in more idealistic contexts
seems to be an unsolved problem, and my observations suggest that it's true
even when there's a crowdfunding model, because now if you make any mob-
justice-able missteps, a bunch of your money immediately goes away. (Arguably
this _should_ be true for the big closed networks too, but it isn't, so you're
still at a disadvantage.)

Non-text telecommunications sometimes involves esoteric skills. There's been
motion to improve things (for instance, the rise of Xiphophorus audio codecs
(Vorbis, Opus, etc.)), but there's still things like echo cancellation and
noise reduction which can get arcane and maybe run into patent minefields (I
haven't checked recently). My Discord calls don't have anywhere near the level
of background noise that my Signal ones do.

I've weakly observed a strain of resistance to acknowledging or prying into
uncomfortable models of human psychology among open-source developers, who
tend to lean systematizing and abstracting… I don't have a good perspective on
that one right now, but I guess I'd say the “we need to be friendlier to
Normal People” departments seem to default toward “normal people like flashy
websites” and away from (I'd approximate) “normal people like not having to
keep cognitive context or be put in situations where they might be embarrassed
or have to be responsible for something awkward”. The latter is a much, much
harder set of problems, even if you ignore the ones that are inherent to
network effects and seemingly have to be bypassed by luck. Then again,
proprietary services sometimes mistreat their users in these ways and don't
necessarily get exoduses, so maybe network effects just completely dominate
here; I don't know.

(I guess a secondary problem is that an emotional understanding of the
mechanics of fashion is rare in conjunction with the technical skills to close
gaps like this, because they involve such vastly different approaches to the
world. And that leads into a whole potential digression on whether human
fashion cycles are even _amenable_ to creating a world in which people can
generally live without relying on abusive services for their social lives,
without strong common-knowledge agreement to avoid them.)

I'd love to hear better ideas for tackling any of this. (And sorry for the
core dump!)

~~~
amelius
I think social/communications software should be developed by universities or
perhaps a new kind of institution. And there should be project based grants,
paid from tax money.

The internet was better when the communications software was in fact developed
this way by universities.

Companies can still provide the hardware, of course, but they have no business
looking at our data.

~~~
type0
> And there should be project based grants, paid from tax money.

The vast majority of tax payers don't care that the government spends some
stupendous amounts of money on proprietary systems. It is depressing, but that
won't change until:

lobbying = corruption (allowed = true)

------
scrooched_moose
This has been on my mind a lot recently and I really think the biggest failure
was not making the internet easy to use. Facebook et al won by finally
organizing all of the people/companies/organizations you care about in one
place, and being a 0-friction publishing platform to interact with them.

Pre-Facebook "Grandma" either had to remember 1stbaptistchurchSTL.org,
grandsontimmysawesomeblog.net, granddaughtersara42931.wordpress.com,
nissanusa.com and countless other baffling URLs; or go to Google, which as
good as it was for a while was a crazy bandaid. Now all of these things can be
in one place and she can talk to them effortlessly.

The closest that "the community" ever came to solving this problem was what,
bookmarks and guestbooks?

The privacy implications are unfortunate side effects, but have nothing to do
with out these companies got so dominant to begin with. They solved real
usability issues for the majority of users.

~~~
Frondo
"The community" has had such a hostility to a broadly-accepted user experience
ever since there was a web to browse. (I used to be one of them, back when
<center> was a netscape-only tag. Follow the standards! Write for content!
People don't need that visual jazz!)

There's still a non-negligible contingent on here that insists that the web
should be browseable without javascript; that ship sailed well over a decade
ago. The users decided, rich interfaces are the way to go.

We did fail the world, and this is what we get.

~~~
pishpash
The users decided on rich interfaces? Or the developers did?

~~~
tachyonbeam
I don't think the users decided on anything. Browsers are just prone to insane
feature creep as a result of the game theory involved.

If you are a browser vendor, you don't want your browser to not support a
feature that other browsers don't. Otherwise, users go to a website, and it
doesn't work properly on your browser, and they blame you. If this website is
something important like a bank, a news website they like, anything popular
that their friends use, they might well ditch your browser. As a result, to
some extent, browsers have to support all the features that other browsers do.

On top of this, browser vendors want to remain "innovative", show leadership,
so they keep pushing for new features that other browsers don't have. I mean,
imagine working on some browser team, having the opportunity to push your web
project and having it become a standard web feature, your legacy would live on
forever, the hubris of it is just irresistible. Fuck taking the time to
properly design this API, think of possible use cases, and design something
solid and extensible, let's push WebVirtualReality2000API out before other
browsers do, otherwise they will push theirs first and start gaining traction!

So, back to JavaScript. Brendan Eich worked at Netscape and implemented the
original version of it in two weeks and it was rushed into production. People
started to make use of it. Eventually other browsers had no choice but to
support it, otherwise they were faced with lots of webpages that were broken
without it, webpages that only work in Netscape. Microsoft definitely couldn't
let that happen.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Eventually other browsers had no choice but to support it, otherwise they
> were faced with lots of webpages that were broken without it, webpages that
> only work in Netscape. Microsoft definitely couldn 't let that happen._

And then, some time later, when they had this one opportunity to rip
JavaScript out and replace it with something better (and, once again, Scheme
was a candidate), competition with Microsoft didn't let that happen.

~~~
BrendanEich
There was no such later opportunity.

------
gbhn
I have some direct experience with this. It is summed up as "open standards
people are extraordinarily hard to work with, uncompromising, and subject to
infinite fine splitting of the space. Meanwhile, 5 billion users do not care
and want things to be easy, fast, work well, and be well integrated."

The result of these two forces is that it ends up being extremely difficult to
work on open standards for any kind of data that people care about. (Users
can't see HTTP, so it is fine to standardize. They can see blog titles, so...
no dice.)

~~~
thwarted
_" …Meanwhile, 5 billion users do not care and want things to be easy, fast,
work well, and be well integrated."_

 _They can see blog titles, so... no dice.)_

Hard to place all of the blame on the open standards people if the other side
doesn't want to do anything other than wall people in by not cooperating, with
open standards or each other.

~~~
Swizec
As an enginner I really love and support open standards.

As a user I’m on Apple everything because shit just works and gets out of my
way.

~~~
Moru
It's funny how I always hear this about apple but every time I try to use the
company issued iPhone I get stuck trying to do something that just can't be
done. Can't even plug in a standard sd card or an audio plug...

~~~
Swizec
What kind of mad man uses SD cards with their phone? That’s what the 256gb of
internal storage is for.

Modern Androids don’t have audio plugs anymore either by the way.

But really it sounds liek your problem is that only the company phone is
Apple. The argument really only works when _all_ your devices are apple.
Preferably including your whole family.

If you prefer Android, then all your devices should be that and you’re gonna
hvae a great time.

That’s kinda the joke here. Nobody cares about open standards as long as
everything they do belongs to a single “stack” because interoperability
_sucks_. Like really sucks. Probably on purpose.

Look no further than trying to repeat a Spotify song on Alexa. “Sorry
repeating songs is not supported on Spotify”. My ass it isnt you just don’t
want to.

~~~
Moru
I'm a dinosaur, I only use winamp for music. It still works as I want it. I
can change songs faster at any time I want to, no matter what I'm doing on the
computer with global keys. No need to break away from my flow state.

I fully expect to be moded into oblivion for speaking anything except praise
for the apple frenchise.

I'm also aware that some androids don't have what I want but I still have a
choise what I buy. Most of my phones have replaceable batteries for example.
And sd cards can prevent me from having to buy another phone when the 256 GB
internal storage is full.

I'm old enough to remember "640 MB should be enough..."

~~~
grepballsoffire
I'm mainly a dinosaur for wanting audio jacks as i still use my old Sennheiser
headphones that I bought in 2006, and still work perfectly. I did switch to
Bluetooth headphones for a while but they fell apart after 12 months.

I feel like prices haven't moved in line with inflation, it's just planned
obsolescence has moved further up the price range.

That said, I'm aware that I could buy a second hand iPhone with an audio jack
if I really wanted.

~~~
mattadams
There is something to be said about wired peripherals... their dependability,
ease of use and lack of wasteful batteries that just end up in a landfill.

------
tannhaeuser
W3C is partly to blame for the situation. They don't bother to complete their
spec work anymore - W3C HTML5.3 is officially at CR status, but hasn't be
worked on since october, and SVG 2, which has been reduced basically to
include SVG 1.2's vectorEffect=nonScalingStroke into SVG 1.1, and remove SVG
1.1 features that were never supported by browsers anyway, looks even less
like it'll ever be completed.

At the same time W3C's CSS WG churns out specs (subgrid, trigonometric
functions, etc.), adding to the infeasability to code a browser from scratch
ever again.

If they want to contribute, they could do a lot of things: publish a reduced,
rational profile of HTML (and in particular CSS) to give developers a usable
target specification, rather than a bunch of isolated specs at various degrees
of completion. They could also publish "real" specs with formal semantics and
grammars, rather than the prose they publish now, which doesn't know if it
wants to be an authoring or browser implementation guide. They could also
create a browser from scratch in a formally verifiable language. They could do
more lobbying. Or they could disband, to show the world that the public
doesn't sit at the table when FAANG decides about the future of human
communication.

As it is, the web is becoming a net-negative, a medium for mass propaganda and
censorship, an overly complicated turd leading into monopolies, and a place
where creators don't get their share. W3C needs to demonstrate the actual
value of the web to society, not naively appeal to idealists with their futile
"save the web" campaigning. The web is a means to an end, and failing, not an
end in itself.

~~~
dmitriid
Don’t forget that W3C has been stealing WHATWG’s HTML specifications and
republishing them with credits and attributions stripped:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5swe9b/comment/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5swe9b/comment/ddkwft4)

~~~
tannhaeuser
Idk, maybe W3C didn't do all they could to credit WHATWG, but I didn't
interpret it that way. People actually reading HTML specs know WHATWG very
well. I for one appreciated W3C's efforts to publish a versioned HTML spec
which WHATWG never bothered to do. Rather, WHATWG created a self-serving,
never-ending process around HTML (but mostly JavaScript APIs) that saw Opera
and then MS drop out of creating browsers alltogether. What exactly is the
HTML5 shield logo designed to shield against?

~~~
dmitriid
MS and Opera didn't drop out because WHATWG didn't create versions of the
standard.

Moreover, Opera was one of the founders of WHATWG, and an evolving standard
was (and is) one of the core principles of WHATWG.

------
bb01100100
I've been thinking about the walled garden thing recently. Several of my
friends who are /long/-time users of FB - thanks to its ability to gather
scatterlings from across the world - have started talking about creating
(logically) local and durable (not lost in the ad-injected update feed)
content, memories and information.

As someone who long since gave up trying to provide that type of thing
(because corps did it better/faster with no learning curve, excellent reach,
etc), I find this shift interesting. It speaks of non-technical people wanting
to have real control of their own content; not some token effort that
ultimately enables monetization.

To me, there is still value in the ideas behind older unix services and
protocols; things like gopher, old-school blogs (pre mega-corp platforms), irc
chat, usenet, etc.

I see ActivityPub and IPFS as interesting developments; I'd love to know what
other tools we could string together to help create other (presumably
connected but distributed / federated?) spaces that aren't backed by a
monetization engine.

It would be neat to see a "distro" that stood up a node with long and short-
form content, chat, news and "groups" capabilities. Something a keen but
inexperienced individual could spin up on AWS / GCP / DO / Azure, etc.

Am I crazy?

PS: Wasn't chat solved by Jabber (now xmpp)? IIRC, Yahoo and Google at the
time didn't support it (other than by using brittle bridges).

~~~
toomim
Google supported Jabber in Google Talk, and then deprecated it, and then
removed it in Google Hangouts:
[https://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2015/02/google-
finally-k...](https://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2015/02/google-finally-
kills-off-googletalk-and-xmpp-jabber-integration.html)

~~~
YUMad
Yeah google switched hard from promoting interconnectedness to walled garden
approach cca 2010. This was in response to Facebook's success and possibility
of Facebook overthrowing google as the ad king.

In those days, even Facebook ran an xmpp gateway for their chat.

~~~
dev_north_east
Facebook supported xmpp until about 2015 iirc.

------
iliketosleep
We don't need new regulations. We need the web to be taken out of the hands of
gov. and big corps.

It's interesting how the web started off feeling so very utopian. A naive and
benevolent world that was built upon trust - and therefore easily taken over
when big corps and gov. moved in. We are now galloping towards some kind of
dystopia, where one day we'll be nostalgically watching Black Mirror repeats!

Then you have the Darknet, built on distrust and perceived as somewhat
malevolent. It may seems dystopian at first, but as the community becomes
broader it may actually evolve into the utopia we hoped the web would be -
simply because large entities cannot wrest control of it.

~~~
ModernMech
> We need the web to be taken out of the hands of gov. and big corps.

Interesting use of the passive voice there. Who exactly is going to take the
web out of the hands of gov. and big corps? Technologists?

~~~
iliketosleep
If a critical mass of individuals migrate to a network which replicates the
key functionality of the web but is designed with privacy and decentralization
at the core, I believe it would be safe to say that it's not in the hands of
gov, big corps, or any individual.

~~~
jeremyboom8
Like Holo.host?

------
qwerty456127
> But initiatives like this would require all of society to contribute - from
> members of the public to business and political leaders.

This means almost nobody is going to contribute.

Sad but true - we can't change the world by asking everybody to change. We
have to invent a replacement framework that will be both so great everybody
(both customers and businesses) will love it and at the same time by-design
almost impossible to use a wrong way.

Sir Tim has already invented a framework everybody wanted but failed the
second part. Now he is inventing a new kind of web addressing the second part
but seemingly fails the first part :-(

------
guelo
Tim Berners-Lee is partly to blame, his W3C squandered all of its authority,
partly through incompetence and partly through bureaucracy and corruption, and
now it has little leverage to affect change.

~~~
buzzert
What would they do even if they had authority? What does “authority” even mean
in this context?

~~~
_bxg1
Having the respect of those who implement the spec. To my understanding,
WHATWG has basically usurped all of the W3C's influence and just let it stick
around as a figurehead. But it has no real power anymore to incite change.

~~~
einr
I don't think that altering the technical details regarding the implementation
of HTML, CSS et al would do much of anything to stop the proliferation of
walled gardens and spyware.

~~~
_bxg1
Here is a prime example:

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/8/15942238/web-drm-
standard-...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/8/15942238/web-drm-standard-eme-
approved-controversy)

------
hirundo
The [https://contractfortheweb.org/](https://contractfortheweb.org/) is so
bland as to be impotent. The principles are vague enough to be a Rorschach
test. Presumably it has had all sharp edged filed down to gain consensus. As
an engineer Sir Berners-Lee wants to bring a solution along with the problems
he's found, and this is presumably his best shot. Given his capability that's
depressing confirmation that these are hard problems.

~~~
jchook
Laws stopped crime so no question they'll also fix the Web.

------
buboard
> With the Law of Sea and the Outer Space Treaty, we have preserved new
> frontiers for the common good

No we haven't. We have needlessly put limits to who can go to the stars and
seas, as if the entire oceans and indeed the whole universe belongs to earth's
heads of governments. The web is still the most open platform one can find,
and like all undiscovered lands it is full of dangers and opportunity. We are
hugely thankful to Sir Berners-Lee (my personal hero) for creating and
generously giving us such an open world-wide network full of opportunity. But
the ones who are destroying the web are russia's government, china's
government, the NSA, Europes regulations etc, who not only want to restrict
their subjects physically, but also want to own all their information. This is
a bad proposition born out of fear and will only provide a temporary
protection to corrupt governance. We should instead double down on free
networks, create new channels and underlying infrastructure for information to
flow freely, and perhaps also break up monopolies that funnel too great
amounts of information.

> If we don’t elect politicians who defend a free and open web, if we don’t do
> our part to foster constructive healthy conversations online,

Just like universal human rights, we just can't rely on the electorates to
protect freedoms, we need wide consensus

~~~
pjc50
> russia's government, china's government, the NSA, Europes regulations etc,
> who not only want to restrict their subjects physically, but also want to
> own all their information.

Those really do not belong in the same sentence, especially given that many of
the European regulations are for the preservation of the individual's rights
over their information, in a way that doesn't exist elsewhere.

> we just can't rely on the electorates to protect freedoms, we need wide
> consensus

Consensus among whom, if not the electorate?

~~~
buboard
> Consensus among whom, if not the electorate?

"the electorate" is usually 51% percent who are often regulationg against the
other 49%. That is a bad way to decide about the future of humanity. wide
consensuses also ensure a low level or regulation.

------
seandoe
I don't agree with the idea that the internet needs more regulation. Yes, it
does have it's problems. But I think many solutions are in the making, we just
have to be patient. My idea of what made the web great is its freedom and lack
of regulation. I'm willing to endure some drawbacks in order to maintain a
high level of freedom.

~~~
thekyle
I agree. The only thing regulation is going to do is entrench existing
internet companies and raise the barrier to entry for new startups to compete.

~~~
potta_coffee
Regulation always benefits the rent-seekers. They have the best means of
influencing that regulation in the first place.

~~~
maxerickson
This attitude ignores an awful lot of progress. Or you are just defining
regulation to only include the things that favor your argument.

For instance, the 40 hour workweek is a regulation in the US. Are hourly
employees the rent seekers there? Or the unions and activists that prompted
the change?

~~~
nrb
You’re both right, in that regulation serves the group that most successfully
steers it.

The notion that more often than not, incumbent corporations are the ones
writing the regulations, is not exactly controversial. Given the recent
treatment of net neutrality, I don’t hold out much faith in the open web
getting a fair shake right now.

~~~
ddingus
Insightful.

One could extrapolate this Internet struggle being closely related to how
meaningful ordinary people are represented in government.

In many democracies, and in the US today, big money owns government to the
point of anything at all aimed at defending the interests of ordinary people
seems radical?

And expensive?

We may find there is a cost per person, few dollars per, or small percentage
of time needed to participate in the system or be stripped down, devalued,
tracked and every other thing possible to make money.

------
arendtio
> malicious activity such as hacking and harassment

I don't know, but somehow I see hacking much less of a problem than
harassment. I mean even the bad guys out there, trying to get into our ssh
ports even minute we speak, are just a reminder to secure our systems
properly. Harassment on the other side is a social phenomenon not limited to
the digital world which has no upside that would be proportional to its
downsides.

> problematic system design such as business models that reward clickbait

This is a real problem. I mean, it's not just about the clickbait titles. It
is about an advertisement. So what is advertising? In its essence, you present
information to change the inner state of a human being towards a specific
direction (e.g. my product is cool, buy it!). So what an advertiser does is to
forge information sources. With books, it is not much different, but with the
personalized advertisement, the effectiveness has increased dramatically.
Nowadays, we have effective human manipulation machines which manipulate
millions of humans every day or in other words, someone has managed to crack
democracy...

> unintended consequences, such as aggressive or polarised discussions

Similar to harassment, I don't think the internet is the cause here, but
merely the filter to bring those nasty elements of human nature out of the
dark corners of our societies. After all, people quarrel/fight/kill offline
too. We probably just have to learn as a species to not be afraid our own
disadvantage but to embrace diversity and make the most of combined forces
instead of trying to be just a bit better than our neighbor.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Similar to harassment, I don 't think the internet is the cause here, but
> merely the filter to bring those nasty elements of human nature out of the
> dark corners of our societies._

I'd go a step further. Those things to some extent are natural, and in their
natural form manageable. But the advertising-driven business models on the
Internet serve as _amplifiers_ , and it is they that make "aggressive or
polarized discussions" an actual problem.

~~~
xtf
this - it goes viral

------
cobbzilla
I’m a huge fan of TBL but the solution will not come from governments and
corporations, they have nearly every incentive in the opposite direction.

Slowly, slowly people are waking up to the realization that we the people must
solve this ourselves, with a solution that cannot be controlled by any one
party.

We did this with strong encryption but that was much simpler. The set of memes
and values people need to understand will be similar but larger in scope.

It will probably take 10+ years to get there, but we’ll get there faster the
more we stop looking _up_ to hierarchical authorities for solutions, and
looking _around_ at their fellow netizens.

~~~
falcrist
You're talking about a distributed solution that will never happen. A
centralized system will tend to behave more efficiently than a distributed
system, and the owners of that centralized system will undercut the
distributed system at every stage. Corporatism will block any such movement
via pricing, ease of use, marketing, FUD, and legislation.

If you don't include corporations and governments in the model, that model
will fail.

~~~
einr
_A centralized system will tend to behave more efficiently than a distributed
system_

If that was always true, we literally would not even have the Internet.
Centralized, corporate networks like TYMNET died like flies once the open,
distributed Internet became widely available.

~~~
falcrist
What? The web isn't distributed. It was built upon major trunks and backbones
set up by government projects. All of your data goes through this centralized
network of hubs and backbones as it travels around the internet. In the US,
the infrastructure was sold to private companies (notably, several of the
"baby bells") in the 90s.

------
ajvs
Riot/Matrix is gaining some momentum due to having E2E encryption, federation
and it's ability to bridge with other chat networks like IRC, Discord, Slack,
etc.

XMPP failed due to a Linux distro-like approach where each client supported
different extensions, making cross-client compatibility poor.

Riot/Matrix instead is more similar to using one of the various distros that
are built on top of Ubuntu - so you know it "just works", there's a full
feature set you can expect from using any client and all of them are
compatible with each other.

~~~
jasonzemos
Riot/Matrix is a chat standard, but it's not an open standard. I say this with
melancholy as the developer of the only federating matrix server other than
the reference server developed by the for-profit company (read: for-profit
company) that controls the standard. I do it because this has the potential to
be a great protocol and facilitate a great UX if the controlling party didn't
alienate talent from its ecosystem. Matrix is a lot of gloss, a lot of hype
and cheap talk, but under the hood it's _deeply_ insecure and it's entirely
controlled by a single person (again, read: _a single person_ ). And he is a
fraud. He has lied about the userbase on numerous occasions; the company had
its funding abruptly cut in 2017. It's now funded by scamcoin sales from a
shell called status.im.

Anyway, I think matrix has potential as a traditonal free software community
project which can exercise some leverage against the controlling party, so
that's why I still work on the Construct: [https://github.com/matrix-
construct/construct](https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct)

~~~
jeddy3
> developed by the for-profit company (read: for-profit company)

Isn't this just plain wrong?

Matrix.org is set up as a foundation, which AFAIK is the definition of a non-
profit organization

[https://matrix.org/blog/2018/10/29/introducing-the-matrix-
or...](https://matrix.org/blog/2018/10/29/introducing-the-matrix-org-
foundation-part-1-of-2/)

~~~
jasonzemos
No. The for-profit company only recently setup that foundation after projects
like mine pressured them to do so. They have absolute control over the
foundation's board and direction. There are a few minority seats for others --
they are not filled, last I checked.

Nothing I said was wrong.

------
austincheney
Is the web public or private? People want it both ways but you cannot have
both at the same time. This distinction governs policy, security, and
enforcement and as result are all less clear than they should be. While this
is nebulous the problems spelled out in this letter will continue without
serious resolution.

Compare that to email, which is inherently private and as a result far more
simple to provide laws and policy around. Email is not always secure, but the
platform and concerning laws are very clear.

------
josteink
Maybe Tim could have made this stand _before_ approving WebDRM?

Then at least it would have had some more credibility.

~~~
sametmax
I agree but let's not give any of this more weight. Tim Berners-Lee doesn't
have any leverage for anything, he is speaking in the wind. Most of us are.

------
pdonis
Does anyone else find it odd that contractfortheweb.org pops up a warning that
they're using cookies?

~~~
m463
that's part of the problem.

News media has to report on how crazy it has become, but...

 _" It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it" \-- Upton Sinclair_

------
fxfan
Web is no longer web- it's increasingly becoming a number of sinks.

------
techntoke
I think part of the problem is aside from IPFS, little work has been put into
decentralization and standardization of content. Dynamic content is based
around JavaScript which has and will continue to become a spy tool for
marketers. I don't see the Internet improving until there is other options for
standardizing dynamic content other than JavaScript, and making it easy to
host your content without needing to rely on a centralized cloud platform.

------
johnminter
The content on the Internet ranges from "free" to "paid subscription":

1) We have volunteers that curate content and they have limited time. We need
to be gracious, courteous, and thankful for their effort.

2) Businesses are providing content and generate revenue via subscription,
advertisements, or data mining our input. Put another way, in the last two
cases we are the product.

In all cases the content will be biased because humans are biased. We deal
with that by reading content from multiple points of view and apply critical
thinking and reasoning skills.

We also have to continually remind ourselves that there are people with
disruptive agendas - both individuals and collectives funded by nation states
that have an agenda. How many times have you been notified that your
information has been compromised?... Jurisdictional issues make it hard for
law enforcement agencies to track them down and shut them down. The situation
reminds me of the caricature of the American West in the 1800s - a free-for-
all. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. We need to take security seriously.

------
xtf
Everyone is in the net.

 _\- malicious activity such as hacking and harassment_

 _\- problematic system design such as business models that reward clickbait_

 _\- unintended consequences, such as aggressive or polarised discussions_

These are problems of human evolvement. Education, education, education and
not screaming at each other and discussing with the opposition till consensus.

------
StreamBright
>>> dysfunctional future

More like the dysfunctional present, the best invention that happened recently
to the web is Pocket and reader view. I have stopped reading content on the
web directly because an average web page is full of tracking and ads, some of
them are known attack vectors.

------
JohnFen
I agree with most of what TBL says here (even though I think that a few of the
positions he's taken over the past few years have not helped).

From my point of view, the web is clearly degenerating and the rate of
degeneration is increasing. From my point of view, this is because of privacy
and security issues, not so much what people are using the web to say. For
years now, the web has been growing smaller and smaller for me as more and
more websites (particularly newer ones) become effectively unusable.

I realized last year that it's entirely possible that I may stop using the web
entirely at some point in my lifetime.

------
forinti
I was watching a documentary on animal intelligence and it seemed to me that
once a species gets to a certain level, individuals start cheating and hiding
things from each other. This happens with dolphins and chimps, for example.

What humanity has achieved with the internet is the industrialisation of
lying, cheating, and faking. An individual's ability to cheat was more or less
limited by space (and he had to be convincing). Now a good liar can reach out
to millions and he doesn't even have to show his face (and he can reach the
credulous easily, so he doesn't even have to be as convincing as before).

------
lazyjones
Perspectives are fascinatingly different. For me, the biggest issues of the
near-dysfunctional web are:

1\. registration popups (newsletters, membership) and paywalls that appear
when I click on promising links.

2\. cookie banners, popups, interstitials that pointlessly require additional
actions everywhere, like a stupid second door on a fridge.

3\. stuff that is broken because obscure JS / new non-standard browser feature
doesn't work, possibly because of ad/tracker blocking.

4\. copyright scares and other legal obstacles and uncertainties for
publishers (e.g. GDPR) that drive smaller, especially noncommercial publishers
away from the web, so users become easy victims of multinational corporations
with predatory business practices. This is a much bigger issue than hacking
for small publishers.

What do "polarised discussions" even have to do with the web? We have them in
every pub. The fact that they're prevalent on the web is a sign that something
works, not the opposite.

------
Chico11Kidlet
What did you expect? Everything you open up to commercialism will eventually
turn to poo. Look at television and what it was initially meant to be and
where its ended up.

------
leowoo91
I disagree with arguments on web becoming centralized. Unless you are acting
unethical, there is little control over what you put online. I understand
issue starts with the giants but they are brought under regulations inevitably
to bring the balance back at some point. I think this thread is contributing
to the same cause in natural manner.

~~~
kqr
> I undertand issue starts with the giants but they inevitably go under
> regulations to bring the balance back at some point.

Inevitably? As by some law of nature? Or inevitably under the condition that
people like Tim Berners-Lee speak out and rally people for the cause?

~~~
leowoo91
Anti-trust laws? Without people rallying, of course it wouldn't be possible.

------
tempodox
It's only dysfunctional for non-commercial users. The ones making making money
from it are getting richer than ever.

~~~
Nasrudith
Oh it is dysfunctional for them too they just don't care

------
wormy425
I have not been always been endeared to what TBL thinks the web should be.

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-
con...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-
controversy-w3c-greenlights-drm-web)

------
jedahan
There are projects working to promote a better future for the web. Scuttlebutt
and Dat to name two.

------
Shivetya
Read the letter, the same angst that really has nothing to do with the web
other than highlight it made it easier for the bad actors in society to affect
more people faster. you are not going to fix his list of issues until you fix
mankind. worse is that not everyone will agree on all the items listed, some
may be absolutes but others are far more often a product of where you are in
this world.

so yeah, we have a problem, the web just puts it in the face of everyone at
once

------
rbanffy
Sometimes I feel we invented the Krell Big Machine. The way social networking
damaged our democracies is shocking.

------
sbmassey
No mention of the Solid technology from Inrupt that TBL is meant to be
touting.

------
egberts1
First, you have to stop JavaScript.

------
peterwwillis
Last year, 27 people were murdered in India due to shared WhatsApp messages.
[https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-
and...](https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and-violence-
in-india/)
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/18/technology/wh...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/18/technology/whatsapp-
india-killings.html)

Facebook is used as a platform to attack Rohingya muslims in Myanmar and Sri
Lanka. Over 600,000 have been forced to flee the country.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/world/asia/myanmar-
govern...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/world/asia/myanmar-government-
facebook-rohingya.html)

Politicians have hired companies to mine Facebook data of millions of people
for use in their campaigns.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal)

Foreign governments use social media accounts to spread disinformation and
destabilize elections.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections)

.....But this whole "regulation" thing is clearly overblown. It's not like
there are _serious_ consequences to having multiple Big Brothers that not even
the state controls. Right?

~~~
strictnein
You clearly don't understand what "big brother" is.

"Dangerous" speech has propagated via numerous means for millennia. For
example: ~240 years ago people were fomenting revolt using printing presses.

~~~
peterwwillis
Big Brother is an all-seeing, all-knowing, totalitarian leader of a society
that wields its power for its own sake, using surveillance as a tool towards
that end. That's what some massive corporations effectively are today. People
think today's Big Brothers are benign because their mission statements seem
just or useful, but as I've shown above, there is significant potential for
collateral damage.

You're right, and we've needed to control those means numerous times over the
millennia. Sometimes just to keep the powerful in power, sometimes to check
the powerful, and sometimes to check the surging wave of popular revolt.

