“30” by photographer Claude Covo-Farchi, Paris, France. Image: wikimedia

It’s been thirty years since the World Wide Web was invented. Like many innovations, it was the solution to a problem: a young computer scientist found it inconvenient to switch computers when the data needed was not on the machine at hand. What if a shared database of hypertext links could be sent across a network? The scientist was Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and the network was the three www sequence we now see in http://www. Empowered by COMSAT, an array of communication satellites, the internet and the world wide web have changed the transport of ideas and exchange of cultures. But there are problems: Berners-Lee issued an assessment:

Problems of World Wide Web (and possible paths to their solutions)

Deliberate, malicious intent resulting in hacking, crime, harassment – (laws and codes of conduct);

System Design that creates perverse incentives – (redesign for incentives);

Unintended negative consequences of benevolent design – (research and new models).

Summing up the import of the web’s 30th birthday milestone, Berners-Lee stated: If we give up on building a better web now, the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web.

What actions can we take in the next thirty years to build a better web?

Berners-Lee, Tim (Sir). World Wide Web #30. https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported Licen