
Tim Berners-Lee shares his disappointment on World Wide Web’s 29th birthday - tecknowlogic
http://tecknowlogic.com/world-wide-webs-29th-birthday/
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jfaucett
"The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find
today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been
compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This
concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of
platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared."

I think that now this isn't an internet only phenomena. It seems its bleeding
over into other markets as well. Amazon has already taken over much of retail,
and even traditionally non tech companies (see Unilever or Pearson) have,
through mergers, acquisitions, and other traditional business processes taken
over massive portions of their respective markets.

This is just something, as a sideline observer I think could be happening,
still chance observations, general stock market watching, and news articles
are horrible guides for understanding what's really going on. Does anyone know
what the research says? Do we have, in general, a convergence of markets into
oligopolies dominated by a few big players like what's happened in much of the
tech world?

~~~
aikinai
> Amazon has already taken over much of retail

Amazon only covered 4% of US retail in 2017. I couldn't easily find the global
figure, but it would obviously be much much smaller.

As for the overall idea, I think it depends on the time scale you look at.
Compared to the late 20th century things do seem more consolidated now, but if
you go back any further we're still probably in one of the most distributed
modern economies ever.

~~~
jfaucett
> Amazon only covered 4% of US retail in 2017.

Where did you get that statistic? Was that before the wholefoods acquisition?
That seems very high to me, especially when you consider what retail covers.
[1]

> I think it depends on the time scale you look at

Thinking about the time scales provides an interesting perspective. I think
the core question is whether or not consolidation is a net positive or net
negative for features we want in society (like innovation, freedom of choice,
ability to self actualize, efficiency, productivity, etc). Even then it most
likely depends on how we weight those feature priorities.

1\. [https://www.thebalance.com/us-retail-industry-
overview-28926...](https://www.thebalance.com/us-retail-industry-
overview-2892699)

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Hasknewbie
Since this article is only a rehash of the original one, wouldn't it be better
if this thread pointed to it directly?

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/12/tim-
be...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/12/tim-berners-lee-
web-weapon-regulation-open-letter)

~~~
netsharc
It sounds like one generated by an SEO-bot too... Tell-tale: it keeps
repeating his name, because sentences that refer to him with "he" do not make
good search result snippets.

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cocktailpeanuts
I respectfully disagree with him about regulation.

If open technology failed by becoming closed, it should be another open
technology that defeats it, not some government.

Instead if regulating old tech, they should come up with ways to encourage
implementation of open and decentralized technologies.

This pendulum swing between centralization and decentralization is almost a
given and I'm sure it will happen in one way or another if history is any
evidence. It sucks that the world works the way it does, but this frustration
is exactly what will spur innovation.

Trying to solve this with regulation will do more harm than good because it
will only slow down the potential innovation that will inevitably come as the
frustration intensifies. It will come naturally because people become fed up
with all the bullshit in the world.

~~~
deerpig
The breakup of Ma Bell required a regulatory breakup. Bell Telephone was just
too entrenched to break up on decentralize on it's own, short of a collapse.

No amount of innovation outside of Bell Telephone could have broken it up. TBL
might be correct that we are near that point today with the Internet. The big
players either buy you our or copy your innovation and crush you.

In fact it's worse than that. Look at all the advise given to startups. Create
something that one of the big players will need and get bought out -- that's
been the dream for most startups for a long time now. This is reinforced and
required by VC investors. The whole idea of building an small or medium sized
Internet company that intends to become profitable and remain in business is
now the exception rather than the rule.

Everything in the Silicon Valley ecosystem is designed to reinforce the big
players.

TBL might be right that it could take a Ma Bell breakup kind of intervention
to space where innovation outside of the big companies can have a chance. It's
not that there isn't a level playing field. There isn't a playing field left
at all -- it's branded multi-billion dollar stadiums all the way down.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
That's a valid comparison but not relevant to this particular case IMO.

The phone network was completely and physically owned by Bell.

This is different from the Internet. Bell had the absolute infrastructure
advantage and no new entry could compete with them because of the existing
infrastructure, because competing would mean investing in infrastructure and
that was near impossible.

That is different from how the Internet works. It is true that the WWW layer
became centralized but the lower level stack already has all the ingredients
we need to realize a revolution. There is no physical and absolute monopoly or
oligopoly on the low level Internet protocol.

My point is, trying to fix this with regulation is superficial because all
they're trying to do is solve it on the application layer instead of trying to
fix it fundamentally from a lower level.

Regulation may help a bit in the short term, but as I mentioned, in the long
term it doesn't help because it will only slow down true innovation because
people won't suffer enough. All revolutions naturally occur when people start
suffering and the suffering crosses certain threshold.

I wouldn't say this if it was physically impossible to disrupt the status quo,
but I do believe it's possible without any government intervention and in fact
will be more effective if governments don't intervene and let the market take
care of it eventually.

You can already see the sentiment moving towards this direction and I think
it's a matter of time that there will be enough critical mass to shift away
from these centralized "big players".

~~~
ocdtrekkie
How confident are you that the Internet's infrastructure at the lower level
isn't well centrally controlled? A handful of companies own most of the
Internet backbone. All of them are optimized to working with Google and Amazon
traffic (aka, most of their traffic). Datacenters also make up a pretty big
portion of the Internet's physical network, and a handful of companies also
own most of that as well. Even though there's a number of companies involved,
they all benefit from the status quo.

How is your little startup going to compete with the economies of scale Amazon
or Google can leverage? They can't, which is why a lot of startups build right
on top of Google or Amazon's infrastructure.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
There are a lot of researches being done and products being created in areas
where you don't need to rely on those centralized entities.

Decentralized technologies have very shitty UI, and no one would ever adopt
them at its current state, but with a combination of the recent hype around
them plus the societal change that will frustrate people enough to jump ship
regardless of the relatively shittier user experience, it is very possible to
change.

And once that starts happening, more talent will flow into this area and
innovation will accelerate. This was never possible until now because the
society was relatively stable and nobody needed these solutions. Not so
anymore.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I'm a big fan of decentralization, but most decentralized technologies still
rely on that infrastructure to get around. I haven't seen a long-distance
project that can effectively use mesh networking.

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QasimK
Can I share my low-quality disappointment that the primary article image is a
_1.1MB PNG_ of (I assume) Tim Berners-Lee. No wonder it loaded slowly.

~~~
icebraining
Only because you have a hires screen. It uses srcset to select an
appropriately-sized image (my browser loads a 650KB version).

~~~
sametmax
Since when having a hi-res screen mean very fast internet ? My laptop has a
higher res than my desk screen and I'm reading this from the crappy airport
wifi.

~~~
extra88
The responsive images standard doesn't try to deliver the best image for your
network but the best image for your display. I don't know where things stand
regarding browsers sharing network quality information, it's harder and may
have privacy implications.

You have control of your browser to improve your experience in poor network
situations, you could set it to not load images by default or use your
browser's responsive design mode to make it lie about your screen's pixel
density.

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nakedrobot2
This is the same guy who praised inclusion of DRM as a web standard? Really
Tim?

~~~
ChrisSD
Technically a plugin interface was defined as a web standard, what it
connected to didn't necessarily have to contain DRM. Of course in practice it
was designed for DRM (and makes little sense outside of that) so I get your
point.

On the other hand, our other options were plugins such as flash, using apps
outside of the browser for video sites, or browsers each going their own way
with proprietary technology. Or some mixture of those three.

~~~
mtgx
At least then third-party DRM services, which could in theory work on any
platform, would be viable.

With this "plugin interface" the DRM only has to come from the OS vendor. This
is why you're now starting to see certain Netflix resolutions only working on
certain browser. The browser vendors have already started abusing the _real_
power of DRM: control over competition.

~~~
eveningcoffee
You only see video but this is not important.

The higher risk is that we will have DRM of everything. Imagine the
implications if the whole web page is behind DRM.

~~~
paulmd
To make this explicit for the less imaginative users: markup language as we
know it ceases to exist. You interact with web content through something like
Flash, and we get unblockable ads on _everything_ , and any other conditions
that content providers choose.

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gjvc
If only he'd been in the audience for this talk

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lfyou/alan_ka...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lfyou/alan_kay_in_1997_html_has_gone_back_to_dark_ages/)

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golemotron
Can he please be upbeat on the 30th birthday of the web?

Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Kay, (and to a lesser extent) Richard Stallman do a lot
of messaging that is "this is not what I had in mind." It's good but it might
be interesting to see each of them talk about what we've gotten right for a
change.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Criticism isn’t just done because they’re cranky. It’s because they care, and
want to improve the web. Anybody can acknowledge the good parts of the web but
that doesn’t help it improve.

