
Tim Berners-Lee unveils plan to save the web - edward
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/24/tim-berners-lee-unveils-global-plan-to-save-the-internet
======
kyledrake
If he really wants to save the web, maybe start by reversing the insane
decision on EME DRM that allowed it to turn into a secret vote at the W3C

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

I'm really sick of these "influencers" doing horrible things and then coming
back and expecting us to give them blank checks as defenders of the web, when
they only seem to do the right thing when it's convenient for them. Get your
own house in order before coming out and trying to fix everybody else's.

~~~
bArray
Agreed, I think Tim has gone off the deep end. The time to be vocal about the
future direction of the web was in the wake of the dot com bubble. I think
this is just a case of him trying to secure his legacy.

~~~
rangibaby
"I think this is just a case of him trying to secure his legacy."

I think that's a bit harsh. His invention is one of the greatest of all time,
that's quite a legacy

~~~
goatinaboat
_His invention is one of the greatest of all time_

I am not saying I would have done any better than him in the circumstances but
let’s be honest: TBL didn’t invent hypertext and the WWW is just a poor knock-
off of Englebart’s ideas. It has taken millions of people decades to turn the
WWW into something that can be secured and scaled and actually be useful to
ordinary people. TBL was in the right place at the right time but don’t
overestimate his actual contribution.

[http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/158/90/](http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/158/90/)

~~~
goto11
A poor knock of...which actually worked. And IMHO the web was useful to
"ordinary people" from day one, given they could get access to the internet.

~~~
goatinaboat
Sure, but Gopher and WAIS and Archie and Veronica all worked too

~~~
goto11
Indeed! These were some of the technologies TBL attempted to unify in the web
through the concept of URL's.

------
crazygringo
I'm sorry, but this just sounds like a bunch of feel-good babble that isn't
taking anything seriously.

Free speech? Fundamental rights? "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong
communities"?

Yes, these are all good things. But also all in deep, _fundamental_ conflict
with each other. Moral and political philosophers have been debating how to
resolve them for centuries... and the disagreements are just as strong as
ever.

His plan isn't taking any strong stances at all, which would involve actually
making decisions between competing values. Instead, he's just trying to have
it all -- which sounds good, but provides zero actionable guidance.

~~~
lggdn
It's even worse than feel-good babble. It's signaling TBL's shift from
advocating a decentralized free internet towards a centralized censored
internet.

"Free speech? Fundamental rights?" are what we want, but people who claim to
want free speech and then claim they want "Support the best in humanity"?
"Build strong communities"? ultimately mean that they want censorship.

It's basically what happened to social media and the internet. Remember that
everyone from Reddit to Zuckerburg to news companies claimed they supported
free speech a decade ago. Then money/politics/etc got involved and they
started talking about ""Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong
communities"?" and we have a censored dystopia on our hands.

In china, they use "harmony" as a propaganda tool to justify censorship. In
the west, we use "civility" along with "best in humanity", "universal human
rights", etc to justify censorship.

~~~
72deluxe
I suppose it comes down to who defines "the best" or what good and bad is.
Your definition most likely won't be the same as mine.

Times that by 6 billion (and different cultural attitudes in different lands)
and it's obvious we will never always agree. The World Wide Web won't solve
the differences between people.

I think we should stop pretending it will, or expecting too much of a
collection of computer-served XML. That's all it is, fundamentally. I would
probably say that politics and social movements should stay out of this
serving of XML, as you can't keep all of the people happy all of the time, so
why try?

Increasingly the machines we use are sending data back instead of serving us,
frustratingly.

------
geowwy

      > Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
      > 1. By crafting policies that address the needs of systematically excluded
      >    groups
      > a. Designing gender responsive and inclusive data plans targeting women and
      >    other systematically excluded groups.
    
    

What's he suggesting? Give women discounted internet?

~~~
bArray
> What's he suggesting?

The fact that it is ambiguous leaves room for it to mean whatever the
controlling party wants it to mean. As long as people can't agree on something
as fundamental as the goal, it's doomed to fail.

> Give women discounted internet?

Somehow I don't think he was suggesting a "pink tax" or some kind of "ladies
internet" that filters some explicit pictures. I think "inclusive" roughly
translates as favorable in sentences like these.

Surely the fact that the internet is the exact same price for everybody,
regardless of group characteristics, is the ultimate goal? I don't think it is
sensible to begin adding bias where there currently is none.

~~~
mirimir
> Somehow I don't think he was suggesting a "pink tax" or some kind of "ladies
> internet" that filters some explicit pictures.

It's my impression that the price of internet access is at least somewhat
proportional to local cost of living. And I don't see why there shouldn't be
income-based discounts.

But, perhaps bizarrely enough, I do think that filtered internet access is a
very sensible idea. I mean, it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access
by their underage children. HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users
can manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe search" settings.

So why not let users set that up at the ISP level?

~~~
bArray
> It's my impression that the price of internet access is at

> least somewhat proportional to local cost of living.

Typically as is the cost of food, housing, wages, etc.

> And I don't see why there shouldn't be income-based

> discounts.

Is it really the job of the ISP to account for such things? Not that I agree
with this, but: Surely it would make more sense to balance income at the point
of it arriving in your account, not when you go to spend it?

I don't think we want private companies to become political or biased in any
way, I think this should be the soul responsibility of accountable
politicians, rather than unaccountable corporate entities.

> it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access by their

> underage children

> HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users can

> manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe

> search" settings.

> So why not let users set that up at the ISP level?

Firstly I believe people should have the ability to choose what filters they
impose on themselves, such filters should never be on by default. I can fully
understand and respect the cases for wanting such filtering, but it can also
be extremely dangerous.

Secondly I believe in most cases that such filters do already exist - you can
request such things from your ISP, purchase routers that filter such traffic,
install software onto devices that perform blocking, etc. The options exist
and are actively used.

One real example I remember was a parent installing a simple filter on their
family computer (for their child). It would filter websites and key-
words/phrases from websites, such as "sex". It so happened there was an
incident reported by a local news website with something like "Local Child Sex
Offender Still Not Caught", which of course was filtered to "Local Offender
Still Not Caught". Their child was out playing in this quite high risk area
and the parents were completely unaware of the risks.

The point is, that when acting in what we believe to be in the best interest
of ourselves and others, we can actually cause more damage than good.

~~~
zzo38computer
> The point is, that when acting in what we believe to be in the best interest
> of ourselves and others, we can actually cause more damage than good.

I do agree; you should not add such filters which cause those problems. But
that is the customer's own decision what software to run on their computer,
and not mine.

------
cmdshiftf4
6 months ago Berners-Lee was claiming to be on the road to rolling out Web
2.0, a de-centralized protocol we'd all jump on to be free of this cruft.

Fast-forward to now and his new scheme is a sort of UN for Web 1.0? And, like
the UN, one that is totally powerless beyond sternly written letters and is
governed by some of the greatest infringers of the very rights it's claiming
to protect?

I'm going to assume he isn't as naive as one would have to be to blindly push
such a doomed-to-fail proposition, so on the same assumption this has to be
some sort of fight for relevancy or mere publicity.

------
Aeolun
Does anyone mind me being skeptical if this plan has been signed by Google, MS
and Facebook from the start?

These all sound very nice, but I don’t think there’s any company or government
that would claim not to do these things.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Agreed. Does Google and Facebook "signing" it mean they agree to abide buy the
plan? If not, signing it means nothing.

If so, then either they are lying, or the plan imposes so few restrictions
that it is worthless.

~~~
fourthark
The article says they will be kicked out if they don’t abide by the contract.

We’ll see if that actually happens.

~~~
harry8
"We were excited to support their stated goals but have now resigned as we
disgaree strongly with the way they have changed their focus and departed from
sense to something wholly unworkable which makes us all sad." \--googbrick

2 sweeps:

1) How many of those words will actually be meaningfully different when their
statements are released?

2) When will they pull the trigger to make that happen?

~~~
harry8
Option (b) is of course regulatory capture whereby googbrick innoculate
themesleves from any meanigful future competition. They'll definitely try that
and will embrace totally if they can make it work in some financially
meanigful way in their favour.

Does Berners-Lee have any form in policy? Did he have genuine inventive
insight or just right place right time permissive license? These are genuine
questions I'm asking to which I don't have answers - maybe he's saved the web
before, and his inventive insight was utterly brilliant for all I know?

------
SllX
If you care one wit about saving the web, then you will recognize that both
the best and the worst of humanity will continue to coexist on the web so long
as they continue to exist within humanity.

That does not mean that from a policy or prosecutorial perspective we should
not continue to investigate and prosecute crimes as they occur, but crime
_will_ occur, and the _best_ we can do is work to protect ourselves and
others. That means security and privacy and cryptography.

Now there is the question, does the web need to be saved? I’m open to
discussing whether it does, but the problem with this assertion is that it has
_never_ been easier to build and host a website containing all that you can
legally host. If there are problems, they are legal, not technical. You can
host webshit or family photos or pornography or your blog or a list of links
to your favorite websites or a collection of selfies or a review site or a
private reddit clone or your class notes or some personal research or any
number of other things, because I could sit here all night typing out examples
and probably find out of Hacker News has a character limit in the process.

You can serve JavaScript or ads or well designed style sheets or really really
bad style sheets they make the blink tag look positively understated, or you
can serve plain Jane HTML or even plainer text files, or even PDFs or DOCs or
DOCX files or videos or sounds or any number of other binaries.

I’m not sure entirely what we’ve lost besides the websites that the owners
have chosen not to host any longer. People have made bad choices about where
to host the only copies of something they loved and built and hosted on
someone else’s server, only to see those sites shut down, and will probably
continue to make such choices. This is fine, an integral part of liberty is to
have the ability to source enough rope to hang yourself with.

Enjoy the things you have now, for nothing lasts forever. Make that which you
would like to see more of to seed the world and inspire others.

------
wesammikhail
In my opinion, any form of action that is based on a political or social
arrangement is doomed to fail as it is subject to hijacking at best. Any
potential solution(s) has to be routed in actual technological changes that
are backed by well designed protocols that cannot be changed over night or
misused in the benefit of whomever wields the stick at any given point.All
else is waste of time.

That´s just my 2 cents though!

~~~
a3n
Yeah, but you do have to try.

The political and social arrangement of the U.S. Constitution, for example, is
worth trying to preserve. It will only endure if most of us, and our leaders,
agree to follow it.

Most such arrangements are shared illusions that _are_ doomed, unless we agree
to follow them. It really boils down to that, because we are all fundamentally
free to act as selfish savages of we want.

------
gremlinsinc
What if there were a way to create some sort of centralized/decentralized
identity store... where anyone wanting access to your information would have
to request it, you then supply them a 'key' to gain access...like a pgp key...
they can then use your data for business purposes that you allow... you can
destroy keys at will so you ALWAYS have the means to shut off a business who's
abusing your information, or you could drop off the entire grid by basically
revoking all keys...

This would apply to images as well with your likeness (ai-made or
w/e)...though I'm not sure how you'd enforce that, unless the protocol also
did facial reck/search online notifying you of images of you, that you can
then force to be taken offline through legal means.

Of course there's the argument of who owns the copyright -- the person in the
picture or the photographer even if they took photo w/ or without your
permission/knowledge...etc...

I'm not sure how this would work in the wild, and it's just a concept idea...
It would be nice though in the case of a true dystopian future to be able to
pull yourself off the grid easier than it is today.

~~~
ss3000
I have also pondered on variations of this idea of users _owning_ their own
data and only granting access to their data to apps they trust, as a means to
counter the status quo of every company holding users' data hostage in their
own walled gardens and preventing data mobility between apps.

However, the one thing that I've always struggled with is how to handle apps
that need write access to users' data in order to be useful. For instance, a
messaging app needs to be able to write new messages onto the user-owned data
store, but if we allow arbitrary reads/writes to some namespaced path to the
store, an app simply needs to encrypt the data with some secret key that the
user doesn't know in order to build a decentralized walled garden that stifles
data mobility in the same way that centralized walled gardens do today.

~~~
baroffoos
Sometimes problems are better solved legally rather than technically. You
could spend all year thinking of a way to prevent this or you could just have
a law that states that users must have access to machine readable copies of
all the data you collect about them.

To a computer there is very little you can do to distinguish between
obfuscated and regular data but to a human/legal system the difference is
clear.

------
buboard
Want to save the web quick? Enable 402 Payment Required through some form of
digital wallet that will allow anonymized payments. The lack of payment
streams is the biggest driver of garbage

~~~
tzs
A big problem with sites being paid directly by users is how to treat that
transaction legally. It may require the site to register as a business in
every jurisdiction it has paying visitors, collect taxes for each
jurisdiction, and comply with each jurisdiction’s consumer protection,
privacy, and content restriction laws.

I don’t think you will see any large scale movement to micropayments until at
least the EU and the various US states change their legal frameworks for
digital goods to characterize these transactions as being solely under the
jurisdiction of where the site resides.

~~~
Mengkudulangsat
Just like how the real world has shadow-banking to serve the marginalized, so
should the internet.

I'm keen on the idea that a vibrant portion of internet commerce should be
opaque to governments. Perhaps not the best place to start a formal business
in; where you have to think about accounting and taxes, but it will be a boon
for ad-hoc informal businesses.

I'd like to think of it as facilitating the primordial soup that will give
rise to new ways of doing things.

~~~
ddalex
I've seen postit notes in London advertising (illegal) weed sale by chatting
on encrypted messenger and paying with crypto coin. Both attempts to keep the
authorities in shadow.

Add this to the black markets for exploits, data dump leaks, and skimmed CC
info - I'd say that certainly there is a healthy shadow market on the webz out
there.

The only thing - it's not as visible as it was, say, 10 years ago, when Silk
Road was well known, and we all know how that ended.

------
mirimir
> Three more principles call on individuals to create rich and relevant
> content to make the web a valuable place, build strong online communities
> where everyone feels safe and welcome, and finally, to fight for the web, so
> it remains open to everyone, everywhere.

The "build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome"
point seems impossibly idealistic. And indeed, for lack of a better word,
boring. I'd rather have a diversity of communities, run however they choose.
If someone doesn't feel "safe and welcome", they can just go away.

Also, from [https://contractfortheweb.org/](https://contractfortheweb.org/):

> 1\. By working towards a more inclusive Web:

> a. Adopting best practices on civil discourse online and educating the next
> generation on these matters.

Why must all discourse be "civil"? I mean, that's a value here at HN. But it's
not one for the chans. So shouldn't people have the right to choose?

> b. Committing to amplify the messages of systematically excluded groups, and
> standing up for them when they are being targeted or abused.

I can't help laughing at this. Because I'm like 99% sure that they aren't
including neo-Nazis here. Or even the incels who aren't even vaguely neo-Nazi.

Anyway, in my ideal internet, everyone could post whatever they want, as
anonymously as they want, and as resistant to takedown as they want. And
everyone else could choose what to access.

~~~
goatinaboat
_strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome_

A “strong” community necessarily has members and non-members, insiders and
outsiders. If it doesn’t it’s not a community in any meaningful sense, it’s
just an amorphous crowd. The idea of a community that welcomes everyone
literally is a contradiction in terms.

~~~
krapp
If you think of the internet, as a whole, as a single "community" then you're
right - and I think it would be infeasible to apply a particular moral or
ethical (and inevitably cultural and political) standard at that level, since
"the internet" literally encompasses all of humanity.

But if the internet is seen for what it is, a _network of networks_ and the
web a _community of communities_ then there's no paradox - if one is not
comfortable or welcomed in one community, one can move to, or start, another
community that more accepting.

But then, that allows for exactly the sort of toxic and abusive communities
and users that TBL and many others believe are "destroying" the web.

And they're kind of correct, but not because these communities exist, per se,
or because the 'wrong sorts of people' are allowed to use the web, but because
visibility and dialogue has been mostly centralized along a few large
platforms with disproportionate influence, and as a result of the effect of
SEO and social media algorithms, much of the diversity of the web has been
filtered out for the sake of extremist and commercial content.

------
newscracker
Google, Facebook and Microsoft are supporters of this? And do their names have
to come before many others in the list? Do these companies now have the
audacity to claim that they support or will abide by this contract? It sounds
like propaganda lifted straight out of 1984 — “freedom is slavery” and
“ignorance is strength”.

------
ropiwqefjnpoa
I see it's backed by Microsoft, Google and Facebook, which means it's either
impotent or horrible.

------
vojnovski
Link to the Plan (or Contract as it's being called):
[https://contractfortheweb.org/](https://contractfortheweb.org/)

~~~
leppr
The site's GDPR pop-up doesn't allow opt-out of tracking. What a great example
to set for the web.

~~~
chopin
And phones home to a bunch of Google sites.

I think we can safely ignore this.

------
throwawaysea
No thanks, this seems like it is asking governments and companies to adopt
specific political positions and policies. This seems less like saving a
“neutral” web and more like creating an ideological one. For example:

> Establishing policies designed to respect and promote the achievement of the
> Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those pertaining to education,
> gender equality, systematically excluded groups, climate, and socio-
> environmental justice.

------
infectoid
What happened to TBL's other project where everything was supposed to be
decentralised?

[https://solid.mit.edu](https://solid.mit.edu)

Is it dead?

~~~
Vinnl
It's not dead! It's just no longer at MIT (as is also mentioned on the website
you linked). Tim founded a startup called inrupt (disclosure: I work there,
opinions my own) that aims to stimulate commercial adoption. The links in the
sibling comment by rapnie are an excellent place to start.

~~~
pdimitar
How does an organisation even stimulate others to adopt Solid? I cannot
imagine your daily activities. Can you elaborate, assuming you would be
comfortable to do so?

~~~
Vinnl
I can't disclose everything (I'm not involved with all the parts of the
company), but the most important way in which I contribute to that is by
building developer tooling and writing documentation for engineers looking to
write apps on Solid.

------
zzo38computer
We will need to support not breaking the internet; the web is just a part of
that. Still, they should fix it by making W3C specifications so that it
doesn't have the stupid stuff (because there is a lot of stupid stuff in it
now); but, also is needed to protect free and open internet too, which is
separate but related (and will help to save the web too, although it won't do
it by itself because there are other issues than internet involved). Such as,
ensure that internet packets can be freely distributed (to their intended
destination) without tampering, if they follow the transport-layer protocols
(application-layer protocols, such as HTTP(S), is not the job of the ISP to
enforce; you can use any application-layer protocols on any port numbers in
either direction (it is the job only of the two end points (client and server)
to block the packets they don't want, and not anyone else)). The issues
specific to web is to improve the web browser software (a lot of the stuff is
stupid designs, I think). For internet, ensure you can be part of internet.

------
PaulHoule
It is good that he is talking about people, their motivations, their rights,
their responsibilities, than about technology. (e.g. "Technology X is going to
save us")

------
agotterer
We can start by preventing ads that highjack pages and redirect to undesirable
locations. I tried three times to read the article on my phone and was
redirected to other sites.

~~~
zzo38computer
Yes, and that is part of what is stupid in the web browser design; the design
of the software, and of the W3C standards, need to be improved.

------
danschumann
IMO, news serves the same purpose as zip files... A concise yet accurate
representation of the whole.

What we have today is curve fitting of events to a narrative, taking only the
sentences which create a permutation to support the bias, not seeking
summation.

And/or the curve fits an emotional goal(ie to scare readers into action).

But we can measure zip's efficiency, but it's harder to measure the true
accuracy of events when summarizing, because different points are of varying
levels of importance to different people.

This has led me to pay attention to the signal and ignore the noise; watching
the full speeches, and viewing the sources myself, but most people aren't so
inclined, they just shriek & rage, baited by an inaccurate context shrinker.

Thus, we have hyper informed people who watch full context, as well as
severely misinformed folks, getting bad recaps. It is like the income
disparity gap with information.

------
nojvek
Hasn’t he always had a plan to save the web? What’s one dude supposed to do
against an army of close to trillion dollars mega corporations with millions
of machines and tens of thousands of engineers whose sole purpose is to build
models of their users and spam ads?

Feels like ladila-feel-good article.

------
FerretFred
I can't help thinking that although it's a worthy cause it won't make any
substantial headway as gov/com have infiltrated the current Internet so
pervasively. What we'll end up with is something like the United Nations:
shiny, shouty but ultimately ineffective.

I think what we'll also end up with is an "underground" Internet of the type
that's always seen in dystopian SciFi.

------
symplee
At some point doesn't it becomes easier to start anew Vs. trying to derail the
ten trillion-dollar freight-train momentum of the current Internet?

------
woodandsteel
I like the principles, but I am pessimistic he can persuade the tech companies
and many of the governments (China, Russia, Iran, for instance) to adopt them.
That's because they have such strong motivations to keep things as they are,
and even make them worse.

~~~
lggdn
Why single out China, Russia, Iran?

> That's because they have such strong motivations to keep things as they are,
> and even make them worse.

And the EU, Britain, US, etc don't?

I know it's hard to believe, the leader of internet censorship isn't in China,
Russia or Iran. It's in europe.

"Germany’s Online Crackdowns Inspire the World’s Dictators"

[https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-
crackdow...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdowns-
inspired-the-worlds-dictators-russia-venezuela-india/)

And the leaders of tech censorship isn't in China, it's in the US since major
tech companies are in the US.

~~~
sadness2
> And the leaders of tech censorship isn't in China, it's in the US since
> major tech companies are in the US.

This is like saying Iran is the biggest polluter because they produce oil.

------
kd3
Principles on paper won't work. We need to build these principles into the
technology at a fundamental level so that anyone using it can't do anything
else but use it based on those principles. The technology should require it
and not be able to work otherwise unless you break it.

~~~
a3n
No tech is fool proof, although we should always try for the practical best.

But, say our current tech is as good as we know how to make it. Data breaches,
for example, would be much less s problem if we held relevant people
accountable for due care. Who was the last CxO who went to jail, or was even
criminally investigated and found innocent, for a data breach into their org?
Or a perpetrator, for that matter?

~~~
kd3
In the long term "laws" won't work. What we see throughout history is that
they never work and those who are elected to see to it that it works
themselves are corrupt.

The best option is to code it in the technology. For example, we can make laws
and regulation to see to it that governments don't take more debt or print
more money than they should in order not to cause inflation and economic
crisis, but what we've seen throughout history is that this never works in the
long term.

The better solution was the one Satoshi came up with: program the fixed amount
of currency into the Bitcoin technology with computational and mathematical
checks. Now it's extremely difficult to do anything else unless you can
somehow control or convince the majority of the nodes to accept it.

The same kind of solutions should be developed for the web.

------
GoForthAssemble
Most of these answers make me think FAANG staff are a bit omnipresent on HN
nowadays. You know he, standing on Vert's shoulders, invented the flipping WWW
right? You know better and are trying to do what about it exactly?? Oh yeah,
make money.

