Could the Web Not be Invented Today? 267
An anonymous reader writes " Corante's
Copyfight has a
piece up about this new column
in the Financial Times by James Boyle celebrating (a few days on the
early side) the 15th
anniversary of
Berners-Lee's first
draft of a web page .
The hook is this question: What would happen if the Web were
invented today? From the article: 'What would a web designed by the World
Intellectual Property Organisation or the Disney Corporation have
looked like? It would have looked more like pay-television, or
Minitel, the French computer network. Beforehand, the logic of
control always makes sense. Allow anyone to connect to the network?
Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy
and pornography. And of course it is. But it is also much, much
more...The lawyers have learnt their lesson now...When the next
disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web -
is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more
evident. That is not a happy thought.'"
Re:Disruptive technologies can't be controlled. (Score:4, Interesting)
We had fairly established, while unregulated networks. I won't say communication was fast, but it was there. I don't really need to review the wonderful capabilities of BBS's. Probably 25% of the folks who read here were users when BBS's were big.
Could the internet be reinvented? Sure. But, like any large platform, it started small. The next Intranet is being built by a half dozen teenage kids in their darkend bedrooms around the world. It isn't anything now, but will be the biggest thing the world has seen.
This is the most ridiculous "theory" I have heard (Score:3, Interesting)
The web couldn't be invented today because the lawyers learned their lesson... from the web? I've heard the "hindsight is 20/20" saying, but this is ridiculous. Further, why the hell are they talking about WIPO and the Disney corp? It took the brightest minds on the planet, found at places like CERN -- and research budgets of an astronomical scale that could only have been bankrolled by government agencies like the US Army -- to get where we got with the internet and the web. I have never even heard a suggestion that something like this could ever have come from a pile of douchebags like WIPO.
After reading this article, I wish I had found it in a magazine, so I could have the pleasure of throwing it in the trash. This is garbage.
It's time to look forward, not back. (Score:2, Interesting)
- Everything is free, yet nothing is free. (Compensation paradox)
- We don't know who you are, yet there is no privacy. (Identity paradox)
- Write multiple times, yet it still doesn't run everywhere. (Compatibility paradox)
- Code goes over the network, yet it's not mobile. (Boundary paradox)
- The Web is not decentralized enough, yet it is not centralized enough. (Responsibility paradox)
If you are interested, read Abandon the Web! [blogspot.com] Your attention and feedback is greatly appreciated.Too Late To Stop Mentifex Open-Source Seed AI (Score:1, Interesting)
Disruptive technology [wikipedia.org] means that all bets are off and nobody could have predicted in advance what is about to happen now.
Technological Singularity [caltech.edu] is the ultimate, ne plus ultra disruptive technology so currently unimagineable that even science fiction fails to describe what will happen beyond the few clues that we we see awakening around us.
Seed AI [sourceforge.net] is the first harbinger of Open Source Artificial Intelligence metastasizing and propagating itself all over the 'Net.
Recursive self-improvement [sl4.org] of the AI Minds leads to a hard takeoff [sl4.org] of super-intelligent artificial intelligence.
PC-based, AI-ready robots [914pcbots.com] are already being manufactured and pre-ordered by the early adopters of the disruptive AI technology.
The Mind.Forth AI Engine [scn.org] leads the pack of Robot AI Minds germinating and speciating from Seed AI [sourceforge.net] into Singularity AI [sourceforge.net].
Artificial General Intelligence [agiri.org] is already unpreventable [acm.org] and unstoppable [sl4.org].
Have to disagree with the write-up. (Score:1, Interesting)
By definition, a disruptive technology has to be something that is radically unlike anything that's come before. It's something that will be blindingly obvious in hindsight, and it will have a clear path from basic technologies -- probably something that's a quaint curiosity at the moment -- to the ultimate, disruptive form that it takes; but the jump from quaint curiosity to disruptive technology will not be an obvious one, until after the event.
This means that any form of control will have to be tacked on after the event
Anything with a large degree of control up front will not be able to get the momentum necessary to be disruptive. Again, this is virtually by definition. That's progress: you can slow it down, or try to distort it to your own ends, but in the end, it keeps on, somehow slipping through the cracks in the net. And this is a good thing.
Pay television (Score:3, Interesting)
Pay for content. The revolution with the Web is that there is no limitations or anyone controlling the contents there. It used to be, with television, radio, and books, that only the select few producers were able to reach a large audience. Now this has changed to be determined by what you, YOU the reader and potential producer, have to say, and whether, or rather to what extent anyone's interested in it. Now anyone can read, and thanks to Google, anyone can find something they're looking for (as in it may not be what they want, but it will be what they need).
Had the web been created today by any media corporation or association of these, it would have been just another variation on the pay-for-content and "We produce, you consume" theme that is the bread and butter of the media companies today. They do not want to have any competition. And they do not want to surrender their control of the distribution channels.
"We the institutions" (Score:3, Interesting)
In the beginning there was the PLATO network which had a working prototype designed for mass-market which would have amortized itself within 5 years easily at $40/month service, including the rental of a bit-mapped graphics, touch screen, plasma displays. It had realtime multiuser games, even some multiuser 3D first person shooter games [geocities.com], as well as email, discussion fora (the origin of Ozzie's "Notes") and the ability for anyone to write programs for anyone else to run via the network. A single Cyber 760 benchmarked out at several thousand simultaneous users with 1/4 second response time. "Management" decided to focus on the higher profit margin corporate education market.
So I left PLATO and took up position as architect for the authoring system for the mass-market videotex experiment conducted by AT&T and Knight-Ridder News called "Viewtron" -- a service of the joint-venture company, Viewdata Corporation of America. They had done market research which showed that the thing people most wanted was discussion. Having been from PLATO this was no surprise and indeed it was obvious to me people wanted to be able to provide publications and software services to the public. But when I presented an architecture whose primary discipline was to treat the desktop computer as the host system nearest the user (ie: P2P in 1982) I was told by a decision-maker that "we see videotex as 'we the institutions providing you the consumer with information and services'" Yes that was what he said. He may have been trying to get my goat but that is in fact the direction they took things. In any event I was about to be told by the corporate authorities that my P2P telecomputing architecture, which would have provided a dynamically downloaded Forth graphics protocol in 1983 evolving into a distributed Smalltalk-like environment beginning around 1985, would be abandoned due to a corporate commitment to stick with Tandem Computers as the mainframe vendor -- a choice which I had asserted would not be adequate. (At least Postscript survived.) I was subsequently offered the head telecomputing software position at Prodigy by IBM and turned it down when they indicated they would not support my architecture either, due to a committment to limit merchant access to their network to only those who had a special status with the service provider (IBM/CBS/Sears). The distributed Smalltalk system was specifically designed to allow the sort of grassroots commerce now emerging in the world wide web. (Now that via AJAX people recognize JavaScript is similar to the Self programming language and the Common Lisp Object System there is some resurrection of the original vision.) But this wasn't in keeping with IBM's philosophy at that time since they had yet to be humbled by Bill Gates coup but already Gates had locked in his position as the bottleneck between Moore's Law and software by retaining ownership of MS DOS while it was being distributed on IBM's hardware.
Lest people think the government is the ultimate savior in all this -- I did make a run at developing this sort of service on my own nickle using PC hardware but was squashed by the U.S. government when it provided UUCP/Usenet service, via MILnet, to a XENIX-based competitor in San Diego and would not offer me the same subsidy. MILnet was, by law, not for public access. Rather it was exclusively for military use. My complaints to DoD investigators resulted in continual "We're looking into it." replies. By that time Usenet was taking off and I couldn't get a seed market to finance any further work.
What Berners-Lee did was admirable in that he aimed lower -- for the low hanging fruit of simple document presentation. The sacrifice of P2P was, however a bit much to sacrifice. I still think that should have remained the "primary discipline". Things are slowly recovering though.
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:2, Interesting)
Using such an ambiguous language as human language (English, or whatever) seems like a silly idea. Computer language - something with very clear syntax rules - is the way to go.
I can't tell you how many times at work someone will hide behind a stupid "that's not what I meant" argument when clearly they said something else. Human language sucks for accuracy and accountability.
Re:Remember (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt libraries could be invented now (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes: Disruptive Technology (Score:2, Interesting)
Is this a trick question? (Score:1, Interesting)
And you people are looking forward to it, like the sheep that you are!
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:2, Interesting)
ARPANET with 4-nodes was up and running Dec '69, MILNET came after that
80 something iirc
Anyway the point of the thread is still valid, the freedom of the network provided the environment for free thinking and sharing of knowledge.
email, ftp, usenet etc etc came along
I was working at Reuters in late 70's and we developed a packet-switching network for some of thier early Financial systems
They couldn't have been the only ones !
TCP came in 82 or 83
Then the layered stuff like http / html and still technical freedom
These days the applications have too much control, but thanks to the afore mentioned stuff the underlying network and protocols provide an environment which should remain
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:3, Interesting)
Admittedly, lawyers always have the option to decline representation for something they find morally reprehensible, however, believe it or not, lawyers are also supposed to follow a code of ethics which often places a certain obligation to represent people.
Disclaimer: Of course it's not really this cut and dry, but we do ourselves a disservice by placing all the blame on laywers. In this case, killing the lawyers would just mean the underlying technology of the web would be patented by the inventors themselves (as required by their employment contract) or by patent agents (engineers/scientists that are admitted to the patent bar and are NOT lawyers).
The Internet: Inevitable (Score:2, Interesting)
Open standards are part of this - they do a better job for customers than closed ones do. Remember, people tried this with various services. How big are MSN, AOL, Compuserve and all that now?
I predict that the current cellphone companies are going to be in big trouble in a few years, when the wireless technology catches up and provides a cheaper service.
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:2, Interesting)