Reinventing the Web
Tim
Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a way for scientists to find
information. It has since become the world’s most powerful medium for
knowledge, communications and commerce. “It’s been great,” he said, “but
spying, blocking sites, repurposing people’s content, taking you to the wrong
websites: that completely undermines the spirit of helping people create.”
On
Tuesday, Berners-Lee and other top computer scientists — including Brewster
Kahle, head of the Internet Archive and internet activist — gathered to discuss
a new phase for the web.
The
World Wide Web is often subject to control by governments and corporations.
What might happen, the scientists posited, if they could harness newer
technologies — like the software used for digital currencies, or the technology
of peer-to-peer music sharing — to create a more decentralised web with more
privacy, less government and corporate control, and a level of permanence and
reliability?
The
discussions, and the calibre of the people involved, underscored how the World
Wide Web’s direction in recent years has stirred a deep anxiety among some
technologists.
Berners-Lee,
Kahle and others brainstormed at the event, called the Decentralised Web
Summit, over new ways that web pages could be distributed, as well as ways of
storing scientific data without having to pay storage fees to companies, and
creating greater amounts of privacy and accountability.
“Edward
Snowden showed we’ve inadvertently built the world’s largest surveillance
network with the web,” said Kahle, whose group organized the conference. “Just
a few big service providers are the de facto organisers of your experience. We
have the ability to change all that.”
The
scientists talked about how new technologies could increase individual control
over money. For example, if people adapted the so-called ledger system by which
digital currencies are used, a musician might potentially be able to sell
records without intermediaries like Apple’s iTunes; news sites might be able to
have a system of micropayments for reading a single article, instead of
counting on web ads for money.
Berners-Lee
said. “People assume today’s consumer has to make a deal with a marketing
machine to get stuff for ‘free,’ even if they’re horrified by what happens with
their data. Imagine a world where paying for things was easy on both sides.”
The
movement to change how the web is built has an almost religious
dimension.Still, not all the major players agree on whether the web needs
decentralising.
“The
web is already decentralised,” Berners-Lee said. “The problem is the dominance
of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging. We
don’t have a technology problem, we have a social problem.” — NYT
Source | The Hindu | 9 June 2016
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
Best
Paper Award | Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on
Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23,
2016. The title of the paper is “Removing
Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”
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