The Web celebrates its 30th anniversary and the man who invented it sees it – 11/03/2019

This Tuesday they are filled 30 years since the British engineer Tim Berners-Lee proposed a "vague but exciting space, free and open, so that all humanity can share ideas and knowledge", as he himself defined in a video and in an open letter commemorating the anniversary of its creation: the Web.

Both were released Monday by the World Wide Web Foundation, the Boston-based organization created by Berners-Lee in 1994, when he left CERN to settle at MIT, the center where he had invented –March 12, 1989– what we now know as the Internet.

In 1990, Berners-Lee had already devised the three fundamental protocols for the development of a technology that was more about transforming the way we communicated: the HTML (abbreviations of Hyper Text Markup Language, in English), the language with which Internet pages are written; the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), a unique "address" type used to identify each page on the Web and commonly called URL; and the HTTP (the hypertext transfer protocol), which allows the recovery of related resources from the entire web. He did everything on a Next computer, designed by Steve Jobs when he was forced to leave Apple..

Berners-Lee was also responsible for invent the first browser and web page editor (WorldWideWeb.app) and the first server. The first open Internet page was created for CERN in the late 1990s, and in 1991 people outside CERN were invented to join this new community.

Thirty years later, Tim Berners-Lee asked Monday to take advantage of this anniversary to rectify mistakes and avoid their misuse. And he called for users can control their data.

"While the Web has created opportunities, giving voice to marginalized groups and simplifying our lives, created opportunities for crooksgave the floor to those who proclaimed hatred and facilitated the commission of all kinds of crimes ", explains the British scientist in an open letter.

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Published on the eve of a series of events that will mark this 30th anniversary – in Geneva, London and Lagos – the message of the web inventor is a wake up call for all those who have a part of responsibility in this Internet work better and for the benefit of all.

"The philosophy of the Foundation for the Web is to be able to have Complete control of your data. They are not oil, they are not a raw material, they are not a substance, "Berners-Lee said in an interview with a small group of journalists from CERN, the European nuclear research organization where the site is born.

"It should not be possible to sell them for money. Control and access to data is a righthe badured.

However, he acknowledged that it was difficult to impose strict regulations in all cases. "Sometimes you need legislation that provides this personal datalike genetic data, never be used, "he said.

Berners-Lee has particularly warned about a "possible future" in which browsers would keep track of all purchases from a user or his bank details. "Then your browser will know more about you than Amazon"he said.

He also asked Internet users to defend their rights and not wait for governments to do so.

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Change for the better

Beyond this and far from defeatism, Berners-Lee considers that it is perfectly possible that the next thirty years of the Web serve to "change for the better"since "if we do not make an effort to build a better Web today, then let's not say that the Web has failed us, because we will be the ones who will have failed on the Web"

A trained physicist and computer specialist, he worked at CERN a few years after his invention in 1989 and then continued his career in the United States. Nine years ago, he founded WebFoundation, from which he promotes access to the Web and its benefits as a right.

With all the knowledge accumulated, Berners-Lee considers hacking and state-sponsored attacks, as well as online harbadment and criminal behavior, among the leading causes of Internet malfunctioning.

Another trend that worries him is that "creates perverse incentives" for commercial purposes, such as those that generate revenue through the spread of false information or strategies to capture the attention of users and induce them to clicks ("ciberanzuelos").

Finally, he has launched a direct criticism of the administration of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, which he accuses of having "questioned the neutrality of the Internet", in reference to the use mbadive social networks by Russia to influence your favor in the 2016 presidential election.

The greatest tool of social transformation

In the opinion of the Spanish José Manuel Alonso, current director of strategy and collaborations of the World Wide Web Foundation, "The Internet has become, without a doubt, the most important social transformation tool ever created by humankind, for the variety of areas in which it has an impact ".

Throughout history, humanity has reached other very important technological breakthroughs ", but the big change lies in the fact that the transformations introduced by the computer they have effects much faster, than those who have produced other milestones, "says Alonso. The first of these changes is that in the beginning, the Internet was a very scientific and very academic technology. but it spread quickly in all strata of society", Add this software developer.

In this sense, and given the impact of the Internet on people's lives, "the division between those who are online and those who are not, increases the need to make the Web accessible to all. "said Berners. -Read in the note published for the anniversary of its creation.

"In many countries, there are many rights such as the right to freedom of expression, and others enshrined in the Charter of Human Rights, this can not be exercised onlineAlonso recalls that, in addition to "pure social connectivity, the Internet has a positive impact on economic and political aspects," half of the world's population is now absent.

José Manuel Alonso gives as an example a connected agriculture project in which he himself participated in an African country ", in which it has been shown that for a farmer to have access to the Internet or not It may mean not knowing which market to sell your crop on and, therefore, obtain a greater economic benefit. "

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The bombing of ads

Alonso is critical for the business model on which the Internet is currently based: The bombardment of ads based on user preferences based on the data that large companies have from them, without often knowing that they are really ads. "I understand that Google, Facebook or Amazon of something have to live, but this model can not continue. The big question, which are also the majors, and for whom no one has an answer, is what it should be. Facebook asked its Internet users if they were willing to pay to use this social network without receiving advertising. The answer was that no, and that, on the contrary, people claimed to charge the use of their personal data, "says Alonso.

And we always said that the technology was neutral, but we used it well, even if it could change in the digital age. "In recent years, the technologies developed are not so neutral anymore.There is an ethical debate with artificial intelligence, and the algorithms are designed not to be neutral," says Alonso.

In the next 30 years, the network will live a process of decentralization Once a lot of the web traffic is now in the hands of a handful of companies, "No one is asking that software be ethical. That's why, from the World Wide Web Foundation, we believe that it is necessary to collaborate with human rights experts and lawyers to define they must be the technologies of the future, "he said.

Alonso is still optimistic about the Internet that awaits us in the next 30 years. "After a few years of great centralization and with some companies that dominate the majority of Web traffic and that it is impossible to avoid, we will see in the coming years a process of decentralization, especially because of the free will of people ". For Alonso, the same phenomenon that has occurred with the beginnings of Internet access via cell phones will occur. "WPA services only allow users to browse the services of their access provider.The request of people to access the entire network from their terminal has ended with these" fenced gardens ", to borrow from Berners-Lee himself."

Source: La Vanguardia, EFE and AFP

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