Tim Berners-Lee Urges New Open-Source Interoperable Data Standard, Protections from AI (theguardian.com) 16
Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that "Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path
Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users' private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers' mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising...
We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don't implicitly own your data — they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. Sharing your information in a smart way can also liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren't supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data — your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions. You should own it. You should be empowered by it...
We're now at a new crossroads, one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media. The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday, so we must act with urgency. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer, bound by law, regulation and codes of conduct. Why can't the same frameworks be adopted for AI? We have learned from social media that power rests with the monopolies who control and harvest personal data. We can't let the same thing happen with AI.
Berners-Lee also says "we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research," arguing that if we muster the political willpower, "we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders.
"We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It's not too late."
Berners-Lee has also written a new book titled This is For Everyone.
We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don't implicitly own your data — they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. Sharing your information in a smart way can also liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren't supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data — your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions. You should own it. You should be empowered by it...
We're now at a new crossroads, one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media. The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday, so we must act with urgency. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer, bound by law, regulation and codes of conduct. Why can't the same frameworks be adopted for AI? We have learned from social media that power rests with the monopolies who control and harvest personal data. We can't let the same thing happen with AI.
Berners-Lee also says "we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research," arguing that if we muster the political willpower, "we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders.
"We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It's not too late."
Berners-Lee has also written a new book titled This is For Everyone.
Horse and gate (Score:4, Insightful)
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Agreed. This seems hopelessly idealistic at this point in time.
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It's not even a horse and a gate. It's trying to get the horse to stand on one of those little platforms they use in circuses and the horse eventually gets tired of it.
There are still free web pages that live up to Berners-Lee's ideal. I've got a couple as I expect lot of people with the skill to make one do. CERN has one. Lots of big public institutions do. But web pages ain't free, even if you make and host them yourself. Those free web pages are either volunteer efforts, paid for by public funds, or made
Ok ? But who's going to host it ? (Score:4, Interesting)
And we're right back at square one. The reason people consolidate on these big tech platforms like X, Facebook, Youtube, the Bank is because hosting your own data and hoping people find it is the issue, not the format it's stored in.
If all your tweets in solid format are in one place, you still have to tell X where to fetch that data. Now suddenly, instead of X performing simple, local database queries to build a feed to display, it has to perform multiple network queries to various remote endpoints to fetch all the tweets from various "Solid Hosts", which can introduce a lot of latency in retrieving the data.
And since people aren't tech savvy enough to host the data themselves, or don't have proper infrastructure to do so, where do you think all these repositories of data will end up ? Azure, AWS, GCP. Now instead of a free X account or Instagram account, I need to pay Amazon to host my stuff that Reddit fetches to display to people. And I can still get banned from everywhere for wrong think.
Seems like a good idea on paper that would utterly fail in practice.
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This is has been a problem for a long time. In an ideal world, hosting data from one's own personal internet connection, be it from one's phone, work, wherever, should not be as d
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Not only that, but people are relying on third-parties to keep the data available 24/7/365 until the end of time. I can tell you for a fact that if a company goes under, so does your data. I had an SVN repository hosted by a third-party. The company went tits-up and al of that data is now gone. There might be a backup of it somewhere but it's inaccessible to the company's customers. This is really no different that relying on some physical media to store data. Long gone are 7-inch, 5-inch, 3.5 inch fl
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It's not worth it anymore... even if you setup a PHP or whatever server and host the site on your *own* computer, complete with forwarding it through your modem and firewall, and you post useful self-made programs and a blog and have a full message board and chatroom... because you're small, nobody will find it in a search unless you give them the direct address to it.
And, these days, anything you post online is going to get digested by an LLM as "input data" to be regurgitated later for no real reason, and
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Can we ban carrier grade NAT?
I remember when I learned about IPV6 in my IT training class back in the early late 90's early 2000's that it feels to me this universe you describe is what we seemed to think it would enable. Everything on a big network, no NAT, unlimited address space, everything auto magically configured. So much potential.
Re: Ok ? But who's going to host it ? (Score:2)
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Barely anyone uses that outside of progressive circles (even worse than Bluesky), and it's still a bunch of servers hosting other people's content, not people hosting their own content.
Will it increase profits? (Score:2)
Protections from AI (Score:3)
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Just build your web site with cursive script.
Sure, if the bad guys agree to play nice (Score:4, Insightful)
It's an impossible job from a technology perspective. It requires the bad guys to play nice. You can make a secure system that keeps your data out of the hands of everyone, that's not an issue. But you don't want to keep it out of the hands of everyone. You have it online so you can give it out selectively to people and companies. As soon as you let someone see any part of it, though, that part is no longer under your control. I don't care what fancy permissions and terms of use you have on it, you're just trusting that your wishes are respected. Let's face it, if we could trust companies to play nice we wouldn't be in this situation to start with.
Not possible, technically. It might be possible legally, if lawmakers create and enforce penalties for non-compliance. Europe might do it, but no way such anti-business legislation is going to pass in the USA. Not for another decade at least.
Sorry Tim (Score:2)
The billionaire tech bros have killed the Internet. I used to be excited at the possibilities. Now I only curse the outcomes. Google, amongst others, has become a cancer that will only get worse unless people wake the hell up.