‘It’s not too late to fix it’: internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul of the web’ (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to c/world@lemmy.world

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When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.

Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.

In Australia to promote his book, This is for Everyone, Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become – and how he and a community of collaborators can put the power of the web back into the hands of its users.

Berners-Lee describes his excitement in the earliest years of the web as “uncontainable”. Approaching 40 years on, a rebellion is brewing among himself and a community of like-minded activists and developers.

“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.

Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by “charlatans”.

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[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org -1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I don't know, the thing about the internet is that it does bring a ton of value, and operating it does have costs in turn. Maybe Sir Tim is right about DNS being the point where it got commercial, but it was going to happen somehow. Arxiv and Wikipedia still exist, but how do you do Amazon non-commercially? Even YouTube is a challenge.

There used to be a sort of mantra that technology was neutral and people are good and bad. But actually, that’s not true of things on the web

Arguably, that's not the distinction. Technologies can be explicitly of control or of chaos. And then that relative structure or freedom can itself be used for good or for evil.

A central platform is of control, Lemmy or Linux is of chaos. And obviously we lean towards the latter a lot, but for some things even Lemmy wants central control and monitoring, so it's not evil, exactly.

this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026

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