back to article Berners-Lee: Facebook 'threatens' web future

Tim Berners-Lee has dubbed Facebook a threat to the universality of the world wide web. Next month marks the twentieth anniversary of the first webpage – served up by Berners-Lee at the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva – and in the December issue of Scientific American, he celebrates the uniquely democratic nature of his …

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  1. Turtle
    FAIL

    Oversights, Egregious And Otherwise

    Although Microsoft is frequently slated for its failure to make Windows sufficiently secure, to me, it is Berners Lee who really deserves to be taxed with the far more significant failure to build any kind of security into the Internet. If he had ever had the thought that possibly one day the net he was building might have users who were not physicists, the web might not be such a haven for criminality and anti-social behaviour in general.

    1. Graham Marsden
      WTF?

      So...

      ... you're criticising TBL for not having a crystal ball which would allow him to forecast exactly how the web would be used 20 years from its inception?

      Why not criticise Henry Ford for the mass produced motor car, allowing criminals a method of getting away from the Police or Fox-Talbot for creating a method of photography which would allow child pornography or Alexander Graham Bell for inventing the telephone which would let people make dirty phone calls whilst you're at it???

      1. Tom 35

        or Alexander Graham Bell

        The first time a ran into a 419 scam attempt was a voice call. We get bogus scams faxed to us at work all the time, people call me (dispute the do not call list) with offers protect my credit, I won a free trip/prize, clean my ducts (I always tell them I don't have any ducks), and a long list of other scams. Snail mail too.

        Anything useful will be abused by scammers and crooks. Just have to deal with it as we go.

    2. Ed Vim

      Shortsided view

      >> it is Berners Lee who really deserves to be taxed with the far more significant failure

      Things like HTML, TCP/IP, DNS, etc. were never developed to function in such a complicated, high volume way. Today's Internet was never imagined to grow into such a massive monster that it is now. There are so many facets to online technology that were never intended to be taken to the level they have today. Take Flash for instance -- originally it was just for simple, animated games and graphics, then it grew into a standard media delivery mechanism (hopefully to be replaced sooner rather than later by something like HTML5). Blaming Berners Lee for not designing something absolutely no one had any idea would come to fruition is too simplistic, that's ignoring relatively recent history and applying baby-logic to complex issue.

      Microsoft however has a very well documented history of cutting corners, killing competition, and stifling development simply to increase its own revenue stream. People, even in the tech media, keep saying personal computing wouldn't be at the level it is now but what they fail to see is how much further along we would be if other technologies and companies would have been allowed to grow and prosper (a true 'free market' environment, not the highly modified American-style free market).

    3. stewski
      FAIL

      you fail

      One the web and the internet are not the same.

      Two I'd say your statement is analogous to saying the people who administer a dictionary should have prevented swearing, or those that design roads have failed because people have accidents or use them to ferry illegal goods.

    4. thecakeis(not)alie

      Seriously?

      "Think of the children" in one?

      You've got to be ****ing with me.

    5. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: Oversight

      Perhaps he realised that an application protocol is the wrong thing to secure. Instead, you want to secure the transport layer and the addressing system and then let the end-points choose whether and how much to trust the other end. If only there were "sec"ure forms of IP and DNS. Oh, hang on...

    6. Flaco Dude
      Headmaster

      not really

      the Internet was designed without the security, so now Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for not fixing it? hogwash. it may be decades before the castles are not ultimately made on sand. think about it.

    7. Ray Simard

      Completely different community

      I suspect that if you'd been involved with the net then, or if you were, then if you remembered better, you'd recall that the net was a realm of professionals: technical, academic, governmental and administrative types who, for the most part, behaved that way. Security beyond password-protecting logons just didn't seem necessary and didn't even come to mind. It's not just the web; protocols like SMTP can easily been seen to have arisen from within that kind of kinder, gentler arena where functionality and simplicity were the driving forces behind design philosophies.

      Even the most farsighted visionaries of that time who might have anticipated a much rougher net world when it was opened to the public would have had a hard time foreseeing the kind of dog-eat-dog jungle that grew around the net, particularly the combination of resourcefulness and ruthlessness that would later drive the more malignant cancers festering within the net community.

      Let's also not forget that the net's core designs, which largely guided later ones, grew out of a time when individuals did not have computers that could be pwned and rootkitted; people used terminals connected to VAXen and other central machines. Can you imagine anyone of the time foreseeing a botnet?

      The vulnerability of the web is also a product of its evolution. When forms were designed into HTML, who would have anticipated SQL-injection attacks requiring sanitizing input from them? Had anyone even thought about buffer overflows as anything but a programming flaw prone to crashing things by sheer accident, nothing worse? When Netscape invented cookies (IIRC), web use could become somewhat stateful. Who thought people would have to concern themselves with such persistent data being used to Big-Brother their meanderings over the net? Can Vixie be faulted for not anticipating DNS poisoning and fast-flux networks (and that partially from the ability to update domain nameservers in minutes instead of days)? Could they even have imagined even more esoteric, but now common, flaws like cross-site and cross-domain scripting?

      I would have taken a prescient genius to foresee such things back then. Cut BL and kindred some slack, Jack.

    8. Jodo Kast
      Stop

      Trolled by Turtle

      Turtle just trolled you. I checked my crystal ball and it says you will be trolled again in the future.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    Visionaries

    We have always been able to see that Facebook is part of the controlled demolition of society. They needed a way for society to be completely fractured, and yet people should still believe that they were connected to one another (lest they go insane - insane people cannot operate cash registers or broker insurance). They considered drugging us, hijacking education and breaking up the family. But now they have a much more efficient way that we can be trained to believe that we still have our humanity even as the last of it is loaded into the incinerator.

    They gave us a perverted charicature of social interaction. Perverted to make the goal of social interaction intirely about pleasing the self. I am only talking to you because it makes ME happy. Why would I talk to anyone otherwise? That's the world view that Zuckerberg et al push. Because selfish people buy more. No one spends £1,000 on an item of clothing unless they have been trained to believe that they are more important than anyone who is not wearing such clothing.

    But I am optimistic, as people are not accepting the program. Whole crops are being lost.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      22 thumbs up?

      Yeah, facebook is just another wall in the Black Iron Prison. Yet here you are, dribbling your inane conspiracies on a social site that advertises products to consumers.

      And if you think commentarding isn't a "perverted charicature [sic] of social interaction" then, wow, you really need to take a quiet moment to look around you.

      Face it, all 23 of you accepted the program a long time ago.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 22 thumbs up?

        Touché sir. I should start everyday with a good laugh.

  3. Tron Silver badge

    Irony.

    Berners-Lee (you call him Berner-Lee at one point) appears to be accusing Facebook of giving your data added privacy (from the level of privacy you would have on a standard webpage that isn't within a social networking system). Given the incessant complaints about FB not catering to users' needs for privacy, that is somewhat ironic.

    Social networking sites also offer a degree of protection from hacking and DDoS attacks, that bog-standard websites might not get.

    They silo and re-use your data the way other sites do, but because they are social networking and not Amazon or Tesco, they have access to more of it.

    Are cable companies censoring the internet, or are they just delivering data and streams using internet protocols, separate to your standard internet feed? Maybe we need two pipes, one fast and one slow, for the same reason we have motorways and ordinary roads.

    There are more serious threats, most of which come from governments intent on watching everything, recording everything and censoring whatever they want, usually with less than surgical precision. This will reduce us to lowest-common denominator access based on what is acceptable to politicians, who 'block for votes', pandering to religious groups or tabloid scares. In the commercial arena, we have the threat of proprietary technology and the bizarre vagaries of Apple's chief inquisitor, Steve Jobs, banning at whim as the mood takes him.

    Entropy will affect the net, increasingly, whatever we do. Expect a multinet future.

    And discrimination is a given, globally. Many of us in the 'affluent west' can't afford a fast connection, whilst caps will block services for others. Privatised telecoms providers will only roll out the fastest tech in the most lucrative areas.

    Wireless may not be able to handle high capacity feed for a good long while, for technological reasons, not ideological ones.

    Phormware is a definite threat. We may have already lost the concept of an ISP as purely a data faucet, and that is a bad thing which we, and the ISPs themselves, may come to regret.

    Technological development is most threatened by patents and patent trolls. It is becoming impossible to innovate at many levels, as everything you do has so many patents attached to every tiny feature.

    The goal of the web isn't to serve humanity. It is a technology and has no goals, although those that use, develop and control it all have their own agendas. The goal of governments and corporates who directly and indirectly control the web is not to serve humanity. They intend to serve themselves and we have very little power to prevent that.

    Do not expect the future to be bright. We may well look back on the early years of the web, for all the viruses and slow connection rates, as a golden age.

    1. Havin_it

      Oh no he isn't

      Mostly agree, but think you've got the wrong end of the stick on the Facebook point. It's not that Tom, Dick and Harry can't get at your private data; it's that *you* can't. Can't export content or contacts to a different site; can't show content to a chosen outsider unless (a) they sign up too or (b) you show it to everyone else as well; can't delete content later when it becomes a liability down the line.

      I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure that at least nearly as long as there have been HTTP servers, there have been access-control mechanisms of one sort or another. It's what one does with it that's the issue. I might be willing to give Zuckerberg or his ilk the run of my personal data for their benefit while I'm using their services, if I considered that a fair trade, but not in perpetuity!

  4. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
    FAIL

    Err, what?

    Surely the whole point of the Internet is that it is a network full of silo, individual sites with different strengths and weaknesses, different purposes, and different user populations? It was ever thus, and Facebook is no different.

    I think Mr. Berners-Lee needs to step back and take a good hard look at the last twenty years before he starts making such pronouncements.

    GJC

    1. James Butler
      Thumb Down

      The whole point?

      Spoken like a true Facebooker: Closed-minded, uninformed and bitchy.

      No, the "whole point" of the World Wide Web is information SHARING. That's why Berners-Lee distilled the HTML subset from the existing SGML language in the first place: To makew is more simple to SHARE documents over a network.

      Now the Internet, of course, is quite different from the WWW, which is what we are celebrating, this month. The Internet has been around at least since 1967, nearly 25 years prior to the WWW, and, coincidentally, it was ALSO built for information SHARING.

      The WWW thing is, and has always been, one of openness and progress through shared contribution. See? Learning things is good! It helps keep you from seeming completely uninformed when you decide to speak in public. Learn first, THEN speak.

      1. James Butler

        And another thing ...

        Scott Rosenberg (Salon, et al.) speaks well to one of the notions Sir Berners-Lee brings up ... that walled gardens are less useful than open gardens, which is why an open WWW is more valuable than the closed WWW that we see forming underneath our feet.

        In yesterday's blog post (http://www.wordyard.com/2010/11/21/why-the-daily-murdochs-tablet-newspap...) he talks about why Rupert Murdoch's dream for a tablet-only newspaper will likely fail, and he does it by bringing up some of the things Sir Berners-Lee brings up with regard to operating within walled gardens. A brief quote:

        "Why do people love getting their news online? It’s timely, it’s convenient, it’s fast — all that matters. Murdoch’s tablet could match that (though it sounds like it may drop the ball on “timely” and “fast”). But even more important than that, online news is connected: it’s news that you can respond to, link to, share with friends. It is part of a back-and-forth that you are also a part of.

        Murdoch’s tablet thingie will be something else — a throwback to the isolation of pre-Web publications. Like a paywalled website, this tablet “paper” will discourage us from talking about its contents because we can’t link to it. In other words, like a paywalled site, it expects us to pay for something that is actually less useful and valuable than the free competition."

        I totally agree with that position, and believe that it reflects one of the primary points Sir Berners-Lee was making ... paywalls restrict the free flow of information, which results in a less-valuable WWW, not a more-valuable WWW.

  5. Winkypop Silver badge
    Flame

    Let the FaceBookers have their own Internet Lite

    Leave the original cyber-space for us!

    The average IQ on the Net (1.0) would sky rocket.

    1. Tom 35

      Internet Lite

      I think they call that a feature phone.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Facebook users are not a type

      Unless you're some sort of genius, there are at least 10s of millions of people on Facebook that are more intelligent than you.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Thumb Up

        QED

        You posted here anonymously. Can you, and your tens of millions of intelligent people, do that on Facebook?

        Well done, you've helped prove Tim Berners Lee correct.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Come again?

          TBL is correct because El Reg has one feature that facebook doesn't?

          This reminds me of the remark (I cannot remember who made it) that one of the dangers of facebook is that it is impossible to keep your glamours separate from each other. Look, if you can't handle your incoherent glamours contradicting each other, you shouldn't be in that game in the first place.

          And I'm with AC. There's a bunch of very smart people on facebook and some right fucktards on El Reg, as well as the vice being versa. Remarks that generalise about hundreds of millions of people tend to place the speaker in the fucktard camp. There are some incredibly ill-informed, untalented people in IT. I spent most of Friday having to mop up after some of them. And they all had the benefit of a degree in comp sci.

          Get. Over. Yourselves.

          1. Goat Jam
            WTF?

            What the hell

            is a "Glamour"

            1. Daniel 1

              RE: What the hell

              A 'Glamour' is the sort of verbal pomposity, that someone who criticises other people, for being 'pompous', indulges in.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Widen your horizons

                A glamour is a suit is a mask. It's jargon, not pomposity. Now you know how people outside IT feel.

                1. Mr Grumblefish

                  That's me dated then

                  I can remember when 'glamour' was a code word for 'naked boobies'.

          2. Daniel 1

            RE: "I spent most of Friday having to mop up after some of them"

            So... You're a janitor?

            It is, I must say, the first time that I've been told that having a 'degree in Comp Sci' was any kind of benefit to doing anything in particular... Or are they all janitors, as well?

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Titter

              That is all.

      2. fLaMePrOoF
        FAIL

        Do the math...

        "Tens of millions"? Out or 500 million..?

        Tens of thousands maybe...

        Given the standard distribution curve for IQ scores and overall demographic of Facebook users; (yes, there are very distinct 'types' who use Facebook), you certainly wouldn't have to be a genious...

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Just like the good old days when we looked down on the AOLers

      and the WebTVers

      1. Code Monkey

        And Packard, um, Bellers

        According to a mate who used to do Helldesk for Freeserve.

    4. Otto von Humpenstumpf
      Grenade

      Why don't you...

      ...feck off then, and take your superiority complex with you while you're at it.

      Would make the cyberspace a much more pleasant place for the rest of us.

  6. GeorgeTuk
    Stop

    *Yawn*

    How many people have predicted the death of the web now?

    Facebook is the most popular of many similar services, some came before and many will come after, its just a phase as everything is. We all the Cold War was how it would be forever...it wasn't.

  7. semprance
    Thumb Down

    Ttir,amcla/od

    "This is just the complaint Google made earlier this month as it banned Facebook from tapping Gmail's Contacts API. Mountain Views won't allow netizens to export email addresses to Facebook unless it reciprocates."

    Oh come on, that's a bit of a stretch isn't it? If Google were all for 'playing fair' they wouldn't have revoked Facebook's access to their API like some petty child. They probably hadn't even considered it before they didn't get there way.

    Not that Facebook is in the right, let's just not pretend that Google's temper tantrum is an echo of Berners-Lees insightful comments, when really it's just a corporate hissy fit.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Very nice...

    ...but it is a pity that no-one is, or will be, listening to him

    1. MMcA
      Happy

      I have.

      So there.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Closed Worlds

    The thing is, people like to create their own worlds - their called 'communities'. This applies in the physical world and in the web world. The only alternative is to live your life fully in the one world that your govt want you to occupy. A horrible thought, no matter where you live.

    I think it is marvellous that the web provides the means for thousands (or is it millions) of such worlds to be created. The fact that they are closed to some degree isn't a problem - it is necessary for them to exist.

    So I don't see Facebook as a threat just because it's closed. And popular though it is, it doesn't provide the sum-total of the web experience, and never wil.

    I'm more inclined to worry about the threats of criminal activity and government interference. Until they have been eradicated (or at least reduced to nuisance-level), I can't see the web ever being the open all-connected information space that TBL wants.

    1. UBfusion
      Coffee/keyboard

      Facebook: a dangeroys hybrid between herd and individualistic mentalities

      Your view that closeness is necessary for the existence of e.g. Facebook has deeper explanations: Humans constantly strive for two conflicting goals, on the one hand to belong in a group/herd enjoying the privilege of being accepted as a member, and in the other to be accepted as a unique individual (i.e. not belonging anywhere).

      Being on Facebook or buying an iMac/iPhone/iPad not only creates a divide at both the level of being and of having, but also an artificial scarcity ("you don't know what you're missing out "). Personally, I am constantly, actively and proactively resisting the idea of joining Facebook because I totally HATE artificial scarcity of all kinds.

      Therefore I would counter-argue to Mr. TBL that in the same way he does not disclose the things he wants out of public view, or frills at the idea of publicly available video streams of his premises, in the same way the Internet (or any commodity at that) is bound to have private, shady or totally isolated places. Perhaps his views need some more clarification (even He can't model the internet in two pages, can he?) to reflect the view that if hiding your emails and telephone calls from the public (it's 'information' too, isn't it?) is legal, ethical, healthy and even necessary for the individual's survival, then "closed" spaces on the Internet are too.

      On the other hand, I don't think that Mr. TBL had envisaged the Internet as a Panoptikon (the idea/ideal all governments and agencies salivate at).

      At the bottom of it, what consists a "threat" to the Internet? If the internet is seen like a public commodity (like e.g. water, electricity or telephony), the only threat I can see is the threat of controlled access or deprivation. If the Internet is seen as a public right or freedom, the only thing to fear is also controlled access or deprivation. Are you afraid of that? Personally, if this time comes, I'll say "good riddance" with it. I' ll accept that the Internet was my heroin and that now I will have the change to break free.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Der Tim, what are you saying, exactly?

    I know what he's trying to say and generally I agree that open standards are more useful than proprietary stuff. Curious how he mentions itunes but not skype. But anyway. He also says something very disturbing:

    He seems to say that facebook is bad because it doesn't destroy privacy _enough_. "You put info in it, it doesn't have an URI" so the thinking goes you can't share stuff elsewhere you put into facebook. Ok, fine. But at least some of that info is private info. Some things just shouldn't be public.

    Of course, handing that info to facebook gives them power (over you) that you probably shouldn't want them to have, so don't do that. But that doesn't change the fundamental problem that the web has exactly no provisions for handling sensitive data other than "don't do that then". I'd love for that to be enough, but often enough I'm being forced to hand it over anyway, through other people's choices and requirements. Yes, we should become more aware and less free with sensitive data about ourselves.

    But that isn't going to be enough. We also need ways to handle sensitive data safely and privately in the public web space.

  11. Gannon (J.) Dick
    Happy

    Vision

    Vision is the ability to describe a 20 year old punk in printable fashion. TBL does a much better job than I could have.

    What's wrong with the Web was invented long before it's birth. The next 20 years will tell. There is nothing an old punk has to teach a young punk - except to be wary of old punks.

  12. pctechxp

    I spy another threat

    Google.

  13. dephormation.org.uk

    The goal of the Web is to serve humanity

    Facebook a threat to the future of the web? Quite possibly, even probably.

    Gordon Brown? *Definitely*.

    Brown was personally responsible for orchestrating the political corruption surrounding Phorm (or indirectly through Shriti Vadera).

    He ignored petitioners who pleaded for intervention in 2008, and even allowed BT to continue to execute a third trial of illegal mass surveillance.

    Yet the same Gordon Brown was recently appointed to Sir TBL's "World Wide Web Foundation".

    How does Gordan Brown's limitless fascism fit with the vision for the WWW?

    1. MyHeadIsSpinning
      Boffin

      Broon and Berners Lee want data sharing

      Broon wanted to have the isp's handing over all your data via the IMP to the GCHQ to be analysed and used, he wanted to force isp's to share users data without the permission of the users.

      Berners Lee wants websites to allow users to share their data between other websites, so that other companies can analyse and use the data for marketing purposes.

      The thing these two men have in common is that they want our data to be shared between people that they approve of, although they have gone about this in very different ways.

  14. jubtastic1
    Grenade

    "You can’t make a link to any information in the iTunes world"

    I'll just leave this here: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/soul-mining/id211433263

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "You can’t make a link..."

      Wow you completely missed his point. In this context, Information != website.

      1. jubtastic1
        Flame

        Hmm

        Actually, I didn't comment on his point at all, I commented on one of his arguments:

        "Entitled "Love Live the Web," the Scientific American piece goes to promote the use of, yes, open standards. If you don't use open standards, Berners-Lee says, you create "closed worlds." Like Apple's iTunes. "Apple’s iTunes system," he says, "identifies songs and videos using URIs that are open. But instead of 'http:' the addresses begin with 'itunes:,' which is proprietary. You can access an 'itunes:' link only using Apple’s proprietary iTunes program.

        "You can’t make a link to any information in the iTunes world—a song or information about a band. You can’t send that link to someone else to see. You are no longer on the Web. The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace. For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up."

        If you'd bothered to click the http link I posted rather than gut reacting you'd have noticed that he's completely wrong about iTunes. Can you index the entire iTunes store? Yes. Could you mash up the store data to change the presentation? Yes. Would this fall foul of the SIte's TOS? Probably. Are TOS for websites fair? can of worms.

        Webpages are information, human readable and machine parseable, if a bit of info is on a publicly accessible webpage then it's on the web, indexed and sorted.

        </excesskarmaburn>

  15. BioTube
    FAIL

    Since when

    Was internet access a "fundamental right"? Continuous creation of nonsense "rights" like that are the reason we're in this mess!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Since when

      "fundamental right to access the information source of my choice" != "fundamental right to access the internet"

      Which poses an interesting question I suppose, if internet access is a privilege, can people really say that choosing the information they want from the internet is a right? I would say that it is.

      It's not my right to watch TV, but it is my right to freely change the channel on my own TV. And it is not your right to sit outside my house with a jamming device so that I can't watch the channels I want.

      At the end of the day, there is little point even having the internet if it becomes yet another one-way medium. So we should aim to embrace choice not stifle it.

      "Continuous creation of nonsense "rights" like that are the reason we're in this mess!"

      I'd love to know what mess you are referring to.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    Then came the god virus

    And smited every fing on the web.......

    Then no one had nuffing and every one was doomed.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      Wrong Character

      Methinks you have the wrong character, ALL that is EVIL is DOOMED & the Web will SERVE GOD & mankind as it should! :)

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    "Threat To The Internet"

    I guess some other "intellectuals" wring their hands about "threat to the <insert your language here> from SMS". "youngsters lose language skills due to sms use". bla bla.

    "Walled Gardens" have problems and limitations of their own, which will eventually kill them. Here's a list of Dead Or Sick Gardens:

    -AOL

    -MSN

    -BTX

    -MINITEL

    -WIN32

    -MS OFFICE

    -VMS

    -MVS

    -DELPHI

    -VW SMALLTALK/ST80

    All of these systems/standards were based on the principle that a single entity would control it and earn "lots of money" from it. The reality is that open systems/standards flourish and grow stronger by the day. Exactly because a single entity controls/controlled them, these gardens are a failure. Innovation is/was limited, the pricing models are/were restrictive or excessive.

    Thriving Open Standards are:

    + HTML

    + HTTP

    + TCP

    + LINUX

    + C/C++

    + PDF

    + SQL

    + ASN.1

    + SSL/TLS

    + GTK

    + JAVASCRIPT

    + SMTP

    + XML

    I am confident someone will create a standard way of sharing/controlling social networking information and people will leave facebook, because they are tired of being shackled by Zuckerberg or His Highness, The Steve Of Absurdia. Network effects, reuse effects and competition are all extremely strong forces behind open systems/standards. Even Microsoft had to bow to the standard of Javascript and XML. Ultimately, Apple and Facebook will either yield to standards or they will simply go the way of AOL.

    Very basic Economic Forces will effect this.

    1. Steen Hive
      WTF?

      @Economic forces

      "Very basic Economic Forces will effect this."

      Undoubtedly, but what has that to do with "thriving open standards" Every "thriving open standard" you describe was either socially-engineered by committee, or a proprietary creation standardised by social-engineering.

      In general, open standards allow economic forces to work properly, not the converse.

  18. JaitcH
    Pint

    I appreciated TBL's viewpoint; our corporate decision justified

    We have just completed a POS for a service company. It involves providing drawings and text for their technicians to service equipment displayed on a 7" pad.

    One sticking point was whether to provide the access through a pad App or a browser. After several meetings it was decided to go with a browser - and TBL succinctly stated the reasons why our decision was correct - even though we didn't express it coherently.

    Another of our teams has just completed a travel guide for VietNam for both pad and smartphone - again browser based. We have the complete map of VN, as well as key tourist cities - street maps, tourist guides, hotel reviews, etc.

    This shows, I believe, careful thought should be given before commissioning yet another App as to the most effective way of presenting content. Browsers, of course, are an escape from Jobs' ring fenced garden.

    Great article, thanks Register!

    1. foo_bar_baz
      Boffin

      You completed what?

      POS? Piece of Shit? Point of Sale?

    2. Horned-Devil

      Yes but if you can't connect

      What good is a browser based travel guide of VietNam? If I'm there and using it, chances are I'm probably going to struggle to get internet access - yet, if I had downloaded a searchable version onto my pad then I can access it as long as I can get power...

      1. Steen Hive
        Joke

        Connect to 127.0.0.1

        After installing Apache. Better hope it's not an iPad, then ;-)

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Scalability and security

    "Things like HTML, TCP/IP, DNS, etc. were never developed to function in such a complicated, high volume way. Today's Internet was never imagined to grow into such a massive monster that it is now."

    Put HTML (and Flash) to one side for a moment. Those application-layer things are what distinguishes the Web from the Internet. Application layer stuff shouldn't care about the underlying network implementations so long as the data makes it safely and securely from A to B and back. Many of today's underlying problems are mixture of network stuff and application stuff. They're different, but related.

    IP (TCP, whatever), and DNS, and so on, are almost as old as the hills, especially V4. There is of course IPv6, which in its twenty or so years of existence hasn't yet set the world on fire, but does attempt to address scalability and security in some way.

    Before there was IPv6 there was also the OSI networking stuff, which started life as a fresh look at addressing scalability and security, and also interoperability, conformance, and a whole load of other actually quite useful stuff (end to end secure, tamper-proof, and authenticated multi-media email, for just one example).

    But for whatever reason, the Internet industry prefers to stick with its teletype-era email protocols (SMTP and POP3) and try and band-aid their fundamentally unfixable flaws and the fundamental flaws of the underlying layers, rather than admit that the world has changed and so should the protocols.

    One of the reasons OSI didn't catch on back then was it needed more compute power than the near-teletype-era SMTP/POP and friends stuff. That's no problem these days. Another reason was the authentication issue; who's going to manage the authentication, the detractors said? Well, guess what, we still need an answer to that, and if we had one, there'd be a lot less junk email, and maybe there might even be fewer Windows exploits?

    IPv6 wasn't the only option. Maybe it still isn't. Just sayin', like.

  20. Mectron

    not so hard to prevent....

    any company who:

    censor/throttle the internet in any way for any reason is instantly shutdown

    anyone who is not a GOVERMENT law agency who snoop on internet traffic (aka: MPAA/RIAA/ISP) is instantly shutdown

    you not that hard...

    but the bigest threat of internet freedom is ILLEGAL GEOLACATION. AKA: illegally preventing someone from accessing contents base of location. (AKA: netflix, hulu etc,,,) because there is ONLY ONE MARKET: EARTH.)

  21. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Pint

    FB users think of it like this...

    If I walked up to you in the pub on Friday night, in front of your mates, I asked you for your date of birth, where you live, what you did last night, where you went last week, a picture of your wife/girlfriend/kids, where you're going tomorrow, what you bought in TESCO/Argos/COMET this morning.

    Would you give me any of this information or would you and your mates tell me to F-off and even call the management over say that a weirdo was asking loads for loads of info? Yet you will post all this in full view of millions of people worldwide.

    TBL has not denounced FB as such, but has said that they are selfish and only consider the financial gain of collecting all this info for their own purposes. For all Zuckerberg's guff about "sharing and being open" he is still a flim-flam man running a hall of mirrors to collect the info he needs to pass to the ad-men.

    TBL is one of the few tech people worth listening to. He seems to live by the old adage "If you have nothing worth saying, shut up until you do.", something Mr Zuckerberg would be advised to learn. Zuckerberg may have changed the world, however TBL changed the world in a way likened to Alexander Graham Bell, while Zuckerberg has done it in a more Ghengis Khan way.

    1. Pandy06269

      Other way around

      "If I walked up to you in the pub on Friday night, in front of your mates, I asked you for your date of birth, where you live, what you did last night, where you went last week, a picture of your wife/girlfriend/kids, where you're going tomorrow, what you bought in TESCO/Argos/COMET this morning."

      I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think the analogy is the wrong way around.

      It's more akin to someone grabbing a megaphone and announcing the above information while standing on top of their car in a 3-lane motorway traffic jam - nobody asked for it but you'll make sure they hear it anyway, and there are plenty of people $hitless who'll listen to it just for something to do.

  22. bradbox

    Let's all have a go at Facebook...

    I don't remember Berners-Lee complaining that Compuserve was a walled garden or a silo. For several years you couldn't even email out of it (which Facebook does allow).

    Why wasn't everyone complaining then?

    1. Rob Davis

      Much less users, perhaps the answer to your question?

      500 million facebook users vs how many compuserve users?

    2. Al Jones

      Why complain when you can do something about it.

      Compuserve wasn't trying to keep it's users out of the Internet - it was built (and successful) before the Internet was widely available, and it became a gateway to the internet for many people. And e-mail to and from @compuserve.com addresses was available long before Berners Lee invented the world wide web.

      I'd imagine that's why everyone wasn't complaining about Compuserve back then (unlike AOL, which was critcised for it's "walled garden" approach for a long time.

  23. Magnus_Pym

    "Oh god you don't still facebook do you"

    This is what facebook know will happen eventually. It's a fashion thing. The fashion will move on to the next big thing. Maybe not today or tomorrow but sometime.

    They have to try to wall people in to fend off the inevitable for as long as possible.

    1. Don Buchholz
      Welcome

      Internet fashion ...

      Really! I'm going to sign up for that MySpace account, soon!

      Facebook/MySpace, etc., they're mostly garbage. Entertainment is the primary value, but, living in America where movie and sports stars are paid millions of $$$ annually, there is great value in embracing that old canard "there's a sucker born every minute."

  24. Just Thinking

    TBL

    He was very sexy in the Avengers. Very funny in AbFab.

    Not so sure about all that campaigning stuff for the Gurkas. Now he wants to re-introduce Latin to the curriculum?

    Just because he did something good once doesn't make him right about everything.

    1. Rob Davis

      agree +1

      ...need a few more esteemed people to stand up and say the same/agree to build momentum on resisting the threats that he describes.

  25. Rob Davis
    Thumb Up

    Great article, Does TBL have a Facebook fan page, or an unofficial one?

    ...and if his speech can be posted there, we can all 'Like' it then :) Unlikely I would guess!

    Great article, I agree with everything he says.

  26. Paul 37

    Vaclav Havel

    Disjointed, often illogical society takes pristine system and makes it disjointed and often illogical in order to get any use out of it.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memorandum

  27. Scott Broukell

    but ......

    i thought that academics and scientists had got their own network back again - The Grid. After the first one got out of the box and nerds started using it randomly. So what's the fuss about TBL ?

    Humins created the internet, so the internet is going to reflect humin things, like the dog-eat-dog stuff mentioned earlier. Wow, who'd a thunk it.

  28. Harry Tuttle
    Headmaster

    TBL means "open standards" NOT "give all your personal data away"

    He means you are not able to dump some sort of a file e.g XML, of all the data sites like facebook hold about you, so that you can analyse / import it into another system.

    i.e there is no open standard for exporting this sort of data so users are increasingly locked in.

    Sites that hold your data have no interest in creating such a standard as they jealously guard the data they have collected about you, and only provide you with a small subset of it: Not enough to transplant your custom elsewhere, should you feel like it.

    I feel sure he does not mean "any third party should be able to access all the data they hold on an individual, on request." Access does NOT mean a by third party, but the individual the data relates to.

  29. Don Mitchell

    Accidents

    Mark Zuckerberg: accidental billionaire

    Tim Berners-Lee: accidently wrote useful software

    At least Zuckerberg had some vision about how important his program might be, as opposed to thinking it would let CERN put its physics papers online.

    1. James Butler
      Thumb Up

      Stupendous!

      What a monumentally ignorant statement!! You are to be commended, sir. I don't think I shall see the like, again.

      Your comment is akin to saying "The guy who first put an ashtray into a car: accidental genius; Henry Ford; accidentally developed modern industrialized society."

      Again, my hearty congratulations on exceeding the bounds of expected idiocy with your comment. Absolutely brilliant!

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