World Wide Web Inventor's Top Predictions as It Turns 35 (cnbc.com) 23
A anonymous reader shares a report: Personal artificial intelligence assistants that know our health status and legal history inside out. The ability to transfer your data from one place to another seamlessly without any roadblocks. These are just some of the predictions for the future of the web from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, on the 35th anniversary of its invention.
[...] Another thing Berners-Lee says might happen in the future is a big tech company being forced to break up. [...] Berners-Lee said he always prefers it when tech companies "do the right thing by themselves" before regulators step in. "That's always been the spirit of the internet." He uses the example of the Data Transfer Initiative, a private initiative that launched in 2018 and is now backed by the likes of Google, Apple, and Meta, to encourage portability of photos, videos and other data between their platforms.
"Maybe the companies were prompted a bit by the possibility of regulation," Berners-Lee said. "But this was an independent thing." However, he added: "Things are changing so quickly. AI is changing very, very quickly. There are monopolies in AI. Monopolies changed pretty quickly back in the web. Maybe at some point in the future, agencies will have to work to break up big companies, but we don't know which company that will be."
[...] Another thing Berners-Lee says might happen in the future is a big tech company being forced to break up. [...] Berners-Lee said he always prefers it when tech companies "do the right thing by themselves" before regulators step in. "That's always been the spirit of the internet." He uses the example of the Data Transfer Initiative, a private initiative that launched in 2018 and is now backed by the likes of Google, Apple, and Meta, to encourage portability of photos, videos and other data between their platforms.
"Maybe the companies were prompted a bit by the possibility of regulation," Berners-Lee said. "But this was an independent thing." However, he added: "Things are changing so quickly. AI is changing very, very quickly. There are monopolies in AI. Monopolies changed pretty quickly back in the web. Maybe at some point in the future, agencies will have to work to break up big companies, but we don't know which company that will be."
My prediction: (Score:3)
Tim Berners-Lee's next attempt to cash in on his fame from a decades old in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time invention is going to fizzle out again.
Re:My prediction: (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Cruelty will be perfected." (Score:2)
Here's the headings from the article for his predictions, so you don't have to:
Re:"Cruelty will be perfected." (Score:4, Interesting)
The spirit of the internet is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
It was crushed beneath the greed of corporations trying to squeeze every penny out of it and nation states trying to turn it into their propaganda tool.
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Maybe time to bring back BBSes?
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The "spirit" of the internet never would have survived as well as it has if it weren't for the corporations and nation states. The free (as in speech) internet costs money. Cables have to be laid and maintained. Computers have to bought, installed, upgraded. Employees have to be paid.
In that investment, people take some level of ownership. Comcast owns THOSE lines. Starlink owns THOSE satellites. All THOSE websites are stored on Microsoft's servers.
Were there to be infinite resources, it would be different.
Re:The spirit of the internet is dead (Score:4, Informative)
I remember the times when the internet was young. And slow. When a connection across the oceans could have latencies of multiple seconds. Because that server you connected to was hooked up to a 33.6 baud modem and you didn't mind because yours wasn't faster either, so... well. Transferring a gigabyte of data was hellish expensive (yes, you paid for the traffic you transmitted) and it took like forever. Downloading a song (erh... I mean... some audio files that someone made that had 3 minutes play time, roughly, perish the thought of downloading a commercial song...) took well over an hour. If the connection was good. Streaming... yeah, it existed. It was kinda like, well, you could get a frame a second, with choppy mono 8 bit sound... most people didn't bother. Online communication in real time was mostly text based because that was the only thing that really went in real time, i.e. with just a few seconds between messages.
Yes, yes, and the snow in the server room was THIIIIIS high.
And I know that nostalgia is a very lenient goddess, but let's face it, it was a better time. Fewer idiots. Better signal-to-noise ratio. What was there was a labor of love, not one where someone wanted to make a quick buck with. Either that or it was some academia page with actual content that was researched, vetted and someone thought that it would be something someone else might benefit from.
I miss that time.
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There's many things from the 90s I don't need back. Yes. True. But if you weigh the good and the bad... it was, net, better.
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Bet she had no problem making your penis invisible.
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It is/was possible for corporations to get in on it and profit without crushing it.
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Sure, but they didn't want a golden egg per day, they wanted to feast on the goose.
Or CNBC on TBL (Score:1)
CNBC is paywalled for me, they don't like my company's adblockers.
Here's Tim Berners-Lee unfiltered 35 year observations in an open letter. [medium.com]
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They must not like you because it's not paywalled. Click the link, go to the article.
heart warming (Score:2)
good to see that folk still churned out vague technobabble even back then
a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative
It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.
Re: (Score:2)
Where would we be without the invention of the Al-Gore-ithm ?
Re: What's he got to do with the Internet? (Score:2)
Vint Cerf vindicated Al Gore, that joke of yours is only funny to fake nerds now.
Turtle (Score:4, Interesting)
If by the ability to transfer data seamlessly he means the semantic web, RDF or any of its derivatives he's beating a dead horse. It's very hard to make a case to use it for anything.
The available applications are apparently so slow as to be unusable and expressing things (eg. where the data came from) is cumbersome even if it is satisfyingly thorough.
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He's just selling his legacy for money. He's specifically interested in getting his startup off the ground. Allow me to quote the ad that poses as a Wikipedia article (emphasis mine):
In 2015, MIT received a gift from Mastercard to support the development of Solid. Berners-Lee's research team collaborated with the Qatar Computing Research Institute and Oxford University on Solid.
In 2018, Berners-Lee took a sabbatical from MIT to launch a commercial venture based on Solid, named Inrupt. The company's mission