Today's web is owned by spooks, crooks and moguls, so, what to do?
This meeting, the Decentralized Web Summit, was part of a 3-day event organized by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, and sponsored by the Internet Archive, the Ford Foundation, Google, Mozilla, and others. It was as much a revival meeting as a tech conference, a feeling enhanced by the rows of pews that made up the seating. There was a lot of fan-boying and fan-girling going on, as the tech leaders of tomorrow buzzed about how they might get this or that luminary to sign their laptops. (Had there been printed programs—there were not—I’m guessing the rush for autographs would have been intense.)
Today’s Web has a number of problems, the attendees agreed; the most obvious being the kind of surveillance uncovered by Edward Snowden’s revelations and the ability to block access, like China’s Great Firewall.
“That utopian leveling of society, the reinvention of systems of debate...what happened to that?”—Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide ConsortiumTim Berners-Lee, who founded the Web and is now director of the World Wide Web Consortium, pointed out how far it has strayed from the original dreams for the technology. “That utopian leveling of society, the reinvention of the systems of debate and government—what happened to that?” he asked. “We hoped everyone would be making their own web sites—turns out people are afraid to.”
