These are great ideas, and they have enough followers to keep them alive if not to take over the world. But both Berners-Lee and Eich are Davids facing a number of corporate Goliaths who are good at batting away all kinds of stones. — AP
Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google, Microsoft Corp, Twitter Inc – they all endorsed the "Contract for the Web”, a document that Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web, hopes will make sure the Internet doesn’t spawn a dystopia of unequal access, zero privacy and manipulated information.
Those endorsements are enough to dismiss Berners-Lee’s action plan as so much idealistic blather. I’ll believe in the tech giants’ good intentions when they sign on to the Web inventor’s other project, Solid, designed to give users full control over their personal data. Or if they adopt the business model proposed by another web pioneer, Brendan Eich, the creator of the JavaScript programming language.
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