Tim Berners-Lee shares his disappointment on World Wide Web’s 29th birthday(tecknowlogic.com)
tecknowlogic.com
Tim Berners-Lee shares his disappointment on World Wide Web’s 29th birthday
http://tecknowlogic.com/world-wide-webs-29th-birthday/
47 comments
Tim Wu's The Master Switch gives a good historical overview of the consolidation of power that happens in various media/technologies.
Long story short, he says what's currently happening with the internet has happened before. New mediums follow "The Cycle", which means they progress from decentralized to centralized.
Long story short, he says what's currently happening with the internet has happened before. New mediums follow "The Cycle", which means they progress from decentralized to centralized.
> 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.
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.
> 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...
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...
I think that now this isn't an internet only phenomena.
Of course it isn't. It happens to pretty much everything. Pareto's Principle in action. It's so frustrating that this happens but I see no way of fixing it.
Of course it isn't. It happens to pretty much everything. Pareto's Principle in action. It's so frustrating that this happens but I see no way of fixing it.
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-be...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How about the getting rid of patent law? That would get rid of patent trolls, overzealous regulations and spur decentralizatiom.
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.
Only because you have a hires screen. It uses srcset to select an appropriately-sized image (my browser loads a 650KB version).
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.
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.
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.
At exactly what resolution does it begin to make sense to encode a photograph as a PNG instead of a JPEG?
Pretty much never.
how is a 650kb PNG file better when an 80kb JPEG could do the same?
This is the same guy who praised inclusion of DRM as a web standard? Really Tim?
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.
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.
Or video stops being distributed with DRM like almost all audio did. We would have won that war eventually if it wasn't made so easy to use. We were so close when the browsers started shunning plugins like flash. That standard has practically guranteed we will never see it happen.
When audio went DRM free there were options for in browser audio DRM. From RealMedia to Flash and everything in between. I don't think that attempting to standardise away DRM would work. They saw what happened to audio as a threat, not as an opportunity.
> 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 "WELL ACKCHYUALLY" but in defense of DRM?
Perhaps if the veneer of legitimacy is so transparently thin that you can't even be bothered to defend it yourself, you could just not grant it that legitimacy. The academic points really don't matter compared to the fact that you are defending stuff that is hurting us.
LPT: the cause that you are exercising your debate skills in favor of actually does matter, all causes are not actually equal.
> Of course in practice it was designed for DRM (and makes little sense outside of that)
So "WELL ACKCHYUALLY" but in defense of DRM?
Perhaps if the veneer of legitimacy is so transparently thin that you can't even be bothered to defend it yourself, you could just not grant it that legitimacy. The academic points really don't matter compared to the fact that you are defending stuff that is hurting us.
LPT: the cause that you are exercising your debate skills in favor of actually does matter, all causes are not actually equal.
The DRM is not a web standard. Thinking about it, it might actually be better if it was. An open DRM scheme could be reviewed by independent security researchers and open source cross platform implementations could be created.
And what benefit would an ironclad DRM scheme in the browser bring to the internet?
"I, for one, welcome web canvases with ads that I can never block or dismiss." That's what you're saying, right? Because that's what Google wants, at the end of the day.
Those apps will be no less intrusive, and significantly more powerful than what exists today. In fact, you are welcoming a reduction of our freedoms.
edit: God, RMS was right all along, there are no freedoms but end-user freedoms.
"I, for one, welcome web canvases with ads that I can never block or dismiss." That's what you're saying, right? Because that's what Google wants, at the end of the day.
Those apps will be no less intrusive, and significantly more powerful than what exists today. In fact, you are welcoming a reduction of our freedoms.
edit: God, RMS was right all along, there are no freedoms but end-user freedoms.
Blocking DRM on the web is easy. The big issue is the opposite, playing a video you have a right to, without arbitrary restrictions.
So much DRM will force you to use some particular software in some particular way with seemingly arbitrary restrictions. Frankly consumers would be much better off without DRM in the world.
So much DRM will force you to use some particular software in some particular way with seemingly arbitrary restrictions. Frankly consumers would be much better off without DRM in the world.
> Blocking DRM on the web is easy.
It won't be after we expand the powers of plugins to get in underneath the layers you know. You can't block elements or code that you disagree with when there are no elements because everything is a web-canvas or plugin that is rendering underneath you.
Remember when Flash existed? Nobody could block dangerous elements of Flash, it was all or nothing. Why would you ever want to go back to that?
> Frankly consumers would be much better off without DRM in the world.
Great, we agree! So why do you think the powers of DRM should be expanded?
It won't be after we expand the powers of plugins to get in underneath the layers you know. You can't block elements or code that you disagree with when there are no elements because everything is a web-canvas or plugin that is rendering underneath you.
Remember when Flash existed? Nobody could block dangerous elements of Flash, it was all or nothing. Why would you ever want to go back to that?
> Frankly consumers would be much better off without DRM in the world.
Great, we agree! So why do you think the powers of DRM should be expanded?
I think it should be restricted and indeed EME is more restricted than Flash.
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.
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.
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.
The higher risk is that we will have DRM of everything. Imagine the implications if the whole web page is behind DRM.
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.
In theory third party DRM can work on any platform. That they don't is totally on the media industry.
That said it's true the standard should have done more to mandate browser agnosticism, seeing as big media doesn't care. Of course they still could have ignored that mandate.
That said it's true the standard should have done more to mandate browser agnosticism, seeing as big media doesn't care. Of course they still could have ignored that mandate.
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> using apps outside of the browser for video sites
I would still prefer that than including DRM into web pages, at least it's a bit harder for users to use DRM.
I would still prefer that than including DRM into web pages, at least it's a bit harder for users to use DRM.
Perhaps but there are issues with that. Users downloading a random app for every other site they visit is not a good habit to promote.
Secondly it would be very hard to convince the likes of Google and MS that DRM doesn't belong in the browser, especially because the industry wants it. The inconvenience of separate apps is precisely what would make them look for alternatives.
Secondly it would be very hard to convince the likes of Google and MS that DRM doesn't belong in the browser, especially because the industry wants it. The inconvenience of separate apps is precisely what would make them look for alternatives.
What the industry wants should be irrelevant to a "user agent" which is what a browser is supposed to be.
The typical user using the user agent also wants access to "premium content", and also typically is willing to jump through several hoops to get it. Like paying a lot to cable tv providers, signing up for international VPN, risking downloading viruses, etc. etc.
The danger with DRM in the browser being universally available is that more and more content will get locked behind it(say YouTube), but lets not pretend that content providers have not been willing to forgo some revenue in favor of locking things down. E.g Netflix, HBO etc.
The danger with DRM in the browser being universally available is that more and more content will get locked behind it(say YouTube), but lets not pretend that content providers have not been willing to forgo some revenue in favor of locking things down. E.g Netflix, HBO etc.
Ok but tell that to Google or MS, I dare you.
I do, by using Firefox. Mozilla fought against it but eventually had their hands forced. I use it with EME disabled. Unfortunately, my voice alone wont change anything.
Exactly. So long as Google is onboard they'll be some kind of DRM on the web. Mozilla isn't dominant enough to stop an alliance between the media, Google and MS. So the question becomes what sort of DRM is the least worse option?
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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_ka...
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.
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.
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.
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?