Twenty-five years ago, on March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed "a
universal linked information
system" to help itinerant academics from across the globe run a complicated
particle accelerator.
Boy, did the World Wide Web ever exceed those initial expectations.
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| Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web |
Berners-Lee aimed to help the CERN facility in Switzerland, but he called for
a system that worked much more broadly. And spread it did, fostered by the
then-novel idea of hyperlinking that let people feed vast amounts of information
into the Web, giving it a location and a way of finding it later.
"The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that the information it
contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the
scheme would in turn encourage its increased use," Berners-Lee wrote.
That positive feedback loop caught on, and Berners-Lee spawned a global
technological and social force. He also founded the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) to help oversee the Web's technology. Even with developers fixating on
mobile apps and sequestering data within the confines of walled gardens, it's not clear anything will ever be able
to match the Web's critical mass.
25 years ago the Web was born (pictures)
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He suggested the first phase of his hyperlinked data system would take two
people a few months to build. Now, thousands of companies rely on it; thousands
of program mers
build and rebuild it every day; and millions of people expand its wealth of blog
posts, cat pictures, and viral videos.
But for Berners-Lee the job is nowhere near done. His to-do list includes
reining in governmental spying, ensuring personal privacy, getting people to
look beyond their own narrow cultural interests, and reshaping the Web into a
better foundation for software instead of just documents.
Berners-Lee spoke with CNET's Stephen Shankland about what he sees as the
Web's next priorities.
Q: The Web has accomplished remarkable things, spanning the globe and
becoming a universal publishing system. But what are the areas where you think
the Web hasn't fulfilled its potential?
Tim Berners-Lee: The anniversary
gives us a chance to look back but it also serves as a way to look forward. A
lot of people never thought about the Web at all until it was disconnected by
[former President Hosni] Mubarak in Egypt. They realized it's not a constant.
Even with the Snowden revelations, they tend to be thinking just about the phone
issues. Now everybody gets to think about human rights on the Web. What sort of
Web do you want over the next 25 years? Are you satisfied with what you've got
-- or with what you might get if you're not careful?
Since we can credit you with the idea of the Web in the initial days, at
least to a large degree, are you satisfied with what you've got? What would you
like to see over the next 25 years?
Berners-Lee: I've been very satisfied
with the international spirit. It's wonderful how the Web has taken off as
non-national thing. I don't think of it as international, because that's nations
getting together. The Web took off without regard for borders at all. People
have chipped in with all kinds of creativity, inventiveness, and hard work from
all over the planet at the content level and the standards level. The diversity
of stuff you see out there is amazing.
Meanwhile, there's been a constant battle for control of it. We've seen lots
of times when Internet service providers have been tempted to try to restrict
VoIP [voice over Internet protocol]. They've tried to stop people from using
VoIP to support their traditional telephone business, or stop people from using
other people's VoIP to enhance their own VoIP business. We've got ISPs that will
charge you a lot more to watch a movie on somebody else's Web site than their
own Web site.
The control thing -- we've got big companies and big governments. Now in some
countries the corporations and the governments are very hard to tell apart. I'm
concerned about that.
I'm impressed by Wikipedia -- a nice repository of general knowledge -- but
what I want to see that I haven't seen is the Web being used to bridge cultural
divides. Every day we get people falling for the temptation to be xenophobic and
to throw themselves against other cultures. The Web has gone up without national
borders, but when you look at the people that other people support, it tends to
be people very much of same culture.
"Now in some countries the corporations and the governments are very hard to
tell apart. I'm concerned about that."
We look at governing the Internet in a multi-stakeholder, non-national way,
but the world is still very nation-based and people are still very
culture-based. I'd like it if developers on the Web could tackle the question of
how to make Web sites that actually make us more friendly to people we don't
know so well.
Is that a technology question or a culture, politics, and economics question?
I'm an expat living in France and to me it's amazing how much the Web has made
my horizons much more global and made my foreign living much more possible. From
where I sit it seems like the Web has facilitated a lot of cross-cultural
linkages. Can you make that happen more with technology?
Berners-Lee: The
Web works not because HTTP [Hypertext Transfer Protocol, a foundational Web
standard that controls how a Web browser fetches a page from a Web server]
exists. It works because HTTP exists and because people like to link to good
content. They like to link to good content because they think that more people
will read to their own content, and because people psychologically like to be
read.
The dollars flowing and the kudos flowing are the social part of how the Web
works, and HTTP and HTML [the other seminal standard Berners-Lee created, used
to build a Web page] are the technical part of how Web works.
They're intimately connected. You can't do something just with technology,
but often you need to change policy. Copyright law is terrible. It's not enough
to design something like Napster. Napster was a technology introduced without
any thought of whether we could change the social piece of it. It was judged
against existing copyright law, which had been designed for books.
So in order for the Web to fulfill its mission, there have to be changes at
the social, political, and economic level?
Berners-Lee: Yes, keeping the Net
open for example. One thing we're doing is removing all the deep packet
inspection equipment [which lets network equipment examine network data as it's
routed on its way]. The spying stuff will be probably be controlled by
organizations, and you have to bring social systems for holding those
organizations accountable. Those social systems will be based on fundamental
values -- I have the right to use the Web without worrying about being spied
upon. I have the right to connect to your Web site no matter what it is, what
politics you have, what color and culture you are.
What do you think of the transformation of the Web from a publishing medium
to a software foundation -- a foundation on which you can run Web apps? How far
through that transition are we, and what needs to happen to fulfill that
promise? The world of Web apps looks to me still to be pretty rough around the
edges.
Berners-Lee: Web apps are really exciting. The fact you can run a Web
app once and have it run everywhere -- it's got massive benefits. On the other
hand, the standards are still coming out to give you all the features
that you have on a normal system.
[Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 sketched out a template for what would become the
World Wide Web -- a collection of documents hyperlinked to other documents that
could break down the barriers within traditional hierarchical data-storage
systems.]
Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 sketched out a template for what would become the
World Wide Web -- a collection of documents hyperlinked to other documents that
could break down the barriers within traditional hierarchical data-storage
systems.
(Credit: World Wide Web Consortium)
You're right that it's a massive change from being a Web of documents to a
Web of a programmable computer. The Web of documents is a platform people used
to do wonderful things -- dinosaur museums, Wikipedia, and things. With WebRTC
[a standard for Skype-like real-time communication on the Web], for example, Web
pages can talk to each other. The Web as a programmable platform is going to
allow real-time collaboration, videoconferencing based on any Web site, not just
your videoconference Web site. It'll allow data conferencing as well -- people
sharing artwork, sharing ideas, sharing ideas.
The W3C is producing all these APIs [application programming interfaces,
which programmers use to draw on built-in abilities] to make it a really
full-fledged computing platform. With access to the raw primitives, if the
libraries [of prewritten higher-level software] don't give what you want, you
can write it yourself. There will be millions of really interesting libraries
people will be writing to provide features and functionality, to provide
different ways of coding, to provide different ways of doing application
development.
The work of TC39 [the standards group that oversees the Web's JavaScript
programming language] is really important, because there's a lot overlap between
the W3C and TC39. The work going on there is really important, because we're
putting a lot of our eggs in one basket when it comes to language. That language
better be clean and give you want you want.
So much development effort nowadays is going into mobile apps distributed
through Google or Apple app stores, often vertically integrated with various
services. It's very antithetical to the open, interlinked world of the Web. How
much does that concern you, and what can you do to reclaim the developer
momentum that's being lost?
Berners-Lee: It does concern me. I think of
those as legacy applications. At conferences, I encourage people to develop Web
apps. I think people notice if they take a magazine, developed as a native app,
it doesn't interact properly with the Web. There are fundamental philosophical
reasons it's less powerful. If you don't give it a URL [Web address], people
can't tweet about it. If people can't tweet or email about it, then it's not
part of the discourse. So your article, beautiful though it may be on a native
app, is not part of the scene. It's not part of the discourse, it's not part of
life, it's not liked or despised. Being part of the Web is going to be
important.
The idea is to work toward the best of both worlds -- all the advantages of a
native app and all the advantages of the Web. With my fitness tracker, I want it
to run all the time, even offline like a native app. But every day of my workout
history will have a URL and I can link my friends to it.
From a programming point of view, should we be creating lower-level
standards, then people can use those to assemble the higher-level features and
interfaces they need? Or is it the other way and we should be concentrating on
libraries of more automated tools that open the Web up to more programmers? I'm
still wrestling with the idea of how you transform the Web into something that's
programmable.
Berners-Lee: The philosophy, which some people call the
extensible Web philosophy, is that you do both. You expose the lower level and
the higher level. By default, a developer will program at the higher level --
just fetch a Web page and turn a URL into bunch of data off the Web with just a
one line [of programming code]. But then you should be able to reimplement the
code in the browser if you want. By replacing code in the browser with your own
JavaScript, that means you can also experiment with future developments. Maybe
if your version of the code stack turns out to be handy and lots of people like
it, then it'll come out as a new feature of the browser.
Folks on the TAG [the W3C's Technical Architecture Group] talk about
layering. You can rewrite the higher-level things in terms of the lower-level
things.
The biggest change I've seen in the Web in the last year has been the shift
in perspective triggered by the Edward Snowden leaks. How has your perspective
on the Web changed after seeing the organized governmental efforts to extract as
much information as they can?
Berners-Lee: I wasn't surprised NSA and GCHQ
[the US National Security Agency and the UK Government Communications
Headquarters] were spying on the Web. I think it's clear that there needs to be
a complete overhaul of the system of accountability. We just had an MIT-White
House workshop about privacy on the Net. Both technically and socially, the
questions are not simple. It wasn't just a ranting workshop; it was people going
into complicated details. If a government agency has a very large and complete
data set, how do you control the way it's used to make sure individuals aren't
exploited? The mathematics of that are complicated.
"You need to do something to say we are really serious about being
trustworthy about personal and corporate data. Both the UK and the US need to
make it very clear why they can be trusted in the future if people are going to
store their data there."
The challenge for the USA is to put in place some agency, some court which
has a lot more power than the FISA court [which currently oversees some
data-gathering activities] -- a lot more teeth and a lot more respect. You need
to do something to say we are really serious about being trustworthy about
personal and corporate data. Both the UK and the US need to make it very clear
why they can be trusted in the future if people are going to store their data
there.
What do you think about moving everything to secure HTTP [HTTPS is the
secure, encrypted version of HTTP used today for e-commerce transactions but
gradually expanding to e-mail, search, and other domains]? How practical is that
and how many problems would that solve?
Berners-Lee: HTTPS everywhere is a
recommendation. IT departments tend to balk at it, but most of the reasons why
they balk at it are out of date. It used to be you didn't have the processor
power to support HTTPS, but now you can get network cards and SOC
[system-on-a-chip] processors that will do it. It's become a lot cheaper.
Encrypting stuff everywhere is a good idea.
If you look at the way secure establishments are penetrated, it's done by
phishing. The way you phish is you build picture of life within company, by
watching the emails go by and looking at the minutes of the meetings. Then you
write something that looks as though it comes straight out of the company, from
the CEO, saying "Read this quickly," and then you send a zero-day attack.
Phishing is the main way in, and phishing is that much easier when everybody can
just sit on a network and monitor stuff going by.
I use PGP [Pretty Good Privacy e-mail encryption]. I can only use it with
others in my life who use PGP. I recommend you install PGP. We should push on
the people who make PGP software to make it much more friendly. PGP software
should as easy as friending people on Facebook. When you sign with somebody's
key, it should be like friending somebody. It encourages people to encrypt
stuff.
[Tim Berners-Lee and his creation, the World Wide Web, in 1994]
Tim Berners-Lee and his creation, the World Wide Web, in 1994.
(Credit: CERN)
It's funny you should say that. You have done more than almost anybody to
bring about a cloud computing future, but PGP is difficult to use in a
cloud-based environment. Everybody is accustomed to Web-based email. You get it
on your phone, on this PC, on that that tablet. When you're visiting a friend,
you fire up a browser tab and check your email there. You can't do any of that
with PGP.
Berners-Lee: If I can have a personal email cloud it's going to be
on my machine.
My problem is that I have 12 different machines. If I have one computer, then
PGP would be practical. I don't. People have TVs and smartphones and laptops and
tablets.
Berners-Lee: I'd like it to be easier. I agree you can't get PGP
for smartphones. I do have PGP installed on all the laptops and non-portable
things I use. Yes, you have to move keys around between them. We may move toward
more use of personal certificates for HTTPS. The two-factor authentication
people might decide to add client-side certificates to machines. Once you use
two-factor authentication, you go through more hoops, you're more aware of
security, you're spending a certain amount of time each month just keeping those
certificates and passwords up to date. Maybe you're using cloud services to
transfer your keys from one place to another, which can help even though it can
be attacked.
In the future we need to make the secure systems easier to use. Getting a
nice user interface to a secure system is the art of the century.
I'm interested in the idea of trust. Whenever you have humans interacting,
they tend to establish some level of trust that makes transactions efficient --
yes, I believe your money isn't counterfeit or you're not making up the data in
that scientific paper. But then when you have somebody sending troops across a
border or lying on a resume, you have to replace that trust with some
verification regime. Over the last 25 years, have you seen that pendulum shift
more toward the trust side, because there are so many more human interactions
over the Web? Or has it gone the other way where people are more worried because
there are so many criminals trying to get their credit card
data?
Berners-Lee: I don't think people are more or less trusting. People
have to be wary about spam and phishing, which is something they didn't have to
worry about before. To be streetwise in this world requires more distrust.
Meanwhile, people tend to trust a larger group of their friends with stuff.
The Pew Trust interviewed Americans in depth about their experiences. The
average American feels the Web has helped their social relations. It has made
them feel more connected. That's a data point.
The Internet has enabled this very global, social world we live in. It's now
trivially easy to keep in touch with your college roommates. Do you think humans
are geared for this global-scale society, or are we wired for the village scale
so that this is going to bite us in the butt?
Berners-Lee: We can change our
wiring. Even though we can keep in touch, we also need small, closed, intimate
circles. Social networks maybe will learn to be more nuanced. They are learning
bit by bit to give more of a flavor of intimacy when you know you're sharing
things with a very small number of people. There are social
network Sgrouples that specifically is privacy-aware. You can share share stuff
there that they won't share with anybody else.
What I think we are wired for is fresh air and green. We need to be in
nature. We maintain our friendships through a screen where before we would have
gone for a walk through a field with the person next to us. I think we are
universally wired to need to see green stuff, to be in green space, to be in the
open, and see the sun. We have to make sure technology doesn't drive that
out.
So the founder of the World Wide Web suggests you get out from behind your
screen every now and then?
