“Is the website free today? No, at all.” In a forum published in The Guardian, Tim Berners-Lee, co-creator of the World Wide Web (or more simply the “website”), attracts a critical portrait of what has been of what he designed more than 30 years ago.
While working for the European Nuclear Research Organization (CERN), he said he managed to convince his officials that he had to distribute for free and put his ideas in the public domain to “free creativity and collaboration on a global scale.” Thirty years later, he does not regret this choice, but made a bitter observation.
Restore energy to users in their data
To understand what it means, you must first make the difference between “Internet” and “Web.” The first is a set of networks linked to each other, the second is an application that uses these networks, in the same way that emails, cats, voice in IP, etc. In a way, the web is a visual interface, a hypertextual system, which makes it possible to show information formatized and housed in the sites. Therefore, to consult them, you must use a “web” browser, not the Internet.
Tim Berners-Lee goes even further saying that “on many platforms, we are no longer customers but the product.” A peak sent to social networks, but also to companies specialized in artificial intelligence, which feed on the interactions and data of the people who are registered. For Tim Berners-Lee, the situation is contrary to the initial intention of the creation of the web: “There is deliberately harmful content that leads to violence in the real world.”
Lacking the dissemination of false information, which has become a common place, wishes to “restore power” to the individual developing a standard that has designed with their MIT teams for ten years.
The need for a standard to avoid monopolies
These are solid, whose applications do not have user data: “Instead of being in innumerable separate places on the Internet, your data is in one place, controlled by you.”
Clearly, it is about being able to gather in the same place all the data that accumulates on the web, from Facebook comments to YouTube videos, including Reddit’s publications and their sports session with your connected clock.
It is especially the emotion around artificial intelligence that concentrates the greatest of its criticism. He considers that it is necessary to affirm that the generative AI uses legal frameworks and good behaviors: “Social networks have taught us that power is based on the monopolies that control and harvest personal data. We cannot let the same happen with AI.”
Therefore, his desire is to reiterate what happened with the World Wide Web, when the CERN offered without counterpart a technology for all. It should be that such the possibility of AI is difficult, especially because “a political will is needed.” In an attempt to urge people to their cause, he requested the creation of a non -profit organization “similar to CERN”: “We can empower people and take the web, it is not too late.” I am not sure that the Gafam agrees with him.
Source: BFM TV
