While the Internet has the potential to hold endless information, what would be the use if there was no way to track or access the info you wanted?
Realising this some 30 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee – then a fellow at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) – sent his managers a memo called ‘WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project’ on Nov 12, 1990, where he outlined his vision for what would eventually become the World Wide Web.
It was a follow up to his March 1989 memo titled ‘Information Management: A Proposal’, in which the British computer scientist tried to convince management to adopt a global hypertext system to help manage the organisation’s data.
That idea didn’t really gain traction until the following year, when he began writing code for a client program – a browser/editor he called WorldWideWeb – on his new NeXT computer in October 1990, according to Forbes.
Berners-Lee was motivated by the fact that information was still being lost in CERN, due to the high turnover of employees and poor information management which made it difficult for new employees to find and update their predecessors’ data.
“We should work toward a universal linked information system... The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards,” he stated in his 1989 memo, adding that the result should be sufficiently attractive to use so the information contained would grow past a critical threshold.
He predicted that hitting the threshold could be accelerated by allowing large existing databases to be linked together and to new ones, an idea that would eventually become the World Wide Web.
Like modern startup founders annoyed by things that don’t work, Berners-Lee even created the first web browser three months after submitting his November 1990 proposal, and launched the first web server three months after the browser.
“The first web browser – or browser-editor rather – was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the Web.
“Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces),” the man widely credited as the inventor of the Web said, in a retrospective on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Founded in 1994, the W3C is a Web standards organisation led by Berners-Lee which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to ensure the sustainable growth of the Web.
Indeed, it was his decision to release the source code for free that proved instrumental to his creation rapidly taking on a life of its own.
A growing Web
While the Internet had been around in one form or another since the 1960’s and data networking existed in the 1970’s, the Web’s ability to make information easier to access and edit using web browsers boosted the Internet’s popularity in the early 1990’s.
To note, although many today use the term Internet and World Wide Web interchangeably, there is nevertheless a subtle distinction between the two.
As defined by the BBC, “the World Wide Web, or Web for short, are the pages you see when you’re at a device and you’re online. But the Internet is the network of connected computers that the Web works on, as well as what emails and files travel across.
“Think of the Internet as the roads that connect towns and cities together,” said the BBC.
In a retrospective of the Web, The Guardian writer Sean Clarke noted that a team at the US National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) created one of the first mainstream browsers, Mosaic, in 1993. The year after, Netscape launched Navigator which dominated about 80% of web browser usage by 1996.
Another early application of the Web was for users to create and publish websites, with GeoCities being one of the first prominent examples. According to a Comscore Media Metrix report, it was the third most popular site in the world behind AOL and Yahoo, with 19 million unique visitors in December 1998.
At about the same time, search engines like Yahoo, Google and RankDex – incidentally the basis for China’s Baidu search engine – improved the usability of the Web further by the late ‘90s, by indexing websites based on popularity and suggesting those to users when they search for a topic.
In the local scene, one company decided to join the search engine craze by launching the first Malaysian search engine called Cari (www.cari.com.my) in September 1996, according to a report dated June 23, 2005 by The Star.
However by the mid 2000s, searching for information using Google became so popular that it became a transitive verb, meaning to search for something on the Web. The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Dictionary acknowledged its use as such in 2006.
In the spirit of Berner-Lee’s goals that the Web become a place for users to search and edit information, online encyclopaedia Wikipedia was launched in 2001 to do just that.
GeoCities too paved the way for the rise of blogs and social networking sites, which would be dominated by companies like MySpace in 2006, which was in turn dethroned by Facebook by 2009.
Collectively, these sites all helped make the Internet and the Web a huge, and more accessible, depository of data.
According to statistics website Statistica, around 4.57 billion people use the Internet as of July this year, meaning more than half of the people on earth are now online.
Future of the Web
Two design principles pushed by W3C are “Web for All” and “Web on Everything”, which call for the Web to enable humans to share knowledge in a way that makes it benefit all people, across all devices, from smartphones to computers and personal digital assistants.
In a 2018 interview with Vanity Fair, Berners-Lee spoke of his disappointment on how the Web of today failed to keep with those principles.
“The power of the Web wasn’t taken or stolen. We, collectively, by the billions, gave it away with every signed user agreement and intimate moment shared with technology,” the article stated.
This allowed tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon to “monopolise almost everything that happens online, from what we buy to the news we read to who we like”.
“Along with a handful of powerful government agencies, they are able to monitor, manipulate, and spy in once unimaginable ways,” the article stated.
“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places,” Berners-Lee told Vanity Fair.
That the likes of Facebook and Google now collect reams of data on their users in exchange for free services, as well as the rise of so-called “fake news”, online harassment, foreign influence operations and targeted advertising, weighed on Berners-Lee.
He told Vanity Fair that the increasing centralisation of the Web has “ended up producing – with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform – a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human”.
Taking back the Web
Though he never patented his invention, Berners-Lee continues to work on how the Web should or could work.
Beyond the W3C, he is also the chief technology officer with data privacy startup Inrupt, where he advocates for Web users to have autonomy over their private data, rather than the current status quo of letting large tech corporations manage and sell their info.
Bloomberg reported that even banks were getting into commoditising data, with Japan’s Mizuho Financial Group Inc to be the Asian nation’s first to start selling information on consumers’ spending habits and other aggregated data.
This followed a trend where lenders like Bank of America Corp and Lloyds Banking Group Plc were monetising their customer information, not unlike what Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc are already doing.
On Nov 9 this year, Inrupt launched an enterprise platform for clients like the United Kingdom’s news organisation BBC, its National Health Service, NetWest Bank and Belgium’s Flanders government.
The enterprise platform works by placing users’ data on Pods (Personal Online Data Stores), which users have control over so they can give permissions to organisations to access their information.
An analogy used by ZDnet compares Pods to “a personal USB stick for the Web, which aren’t locked in to a single platform and give users the controls to access and use their data”.
In a 2019 interview with Time magazine, Berners-Lee outlined his vision for an alternate world, “in which that data does exist, but it’s at the beck and call of the user themselves; where the apps are actually separated from the data source.
“So when you use an app, it asks, where do you want me to store the data? And you have complete control over who gets access to it. It would be a new world,” he said.
This is as opposed to traditional arrangements where companies like Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc store users’ data on their servers and can sell it to other organisations.
“The Web was always meant to be a platform for creativity, collaboration, and free invention – but that’s not what we are seeing today,” said Berners-Lee, on the Inrupt blog.
He added that current systems hampered users from accessing their own data yet let others exploit it, causing “very reasonable public scepticism” about how personal data was being misused.
This in turn led to increasingly complex data regulations like Malaysia’s Personal Data Protection Act, the Europe Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Privacy Act.
These laws attempt to curb what data companies could collect and sell about their customers.
“In the 30 years since development of the Web began, it has become clear that the web platform can often be used in ways that subvert that mission.
“Furthermore, web technologies can be used to cause harm, which is not in keeping with the spirit of this social mission,” said Berners-Lee in W3C’s Ethical Web Principles.
“The Web must be for good,” concluded Berners-Lee.
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