this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026

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497

‘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 23 hours 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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[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2 points 25 minutes ago

“The internet” should just be dumb pipes that transport bits. Period.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 1 points 2 minutes ago* (last edited 54 seconds ago)

I would make a somewhat controversial case that one of the main ruiners of the internet and our entire social contract has been the "free with marketing" model that replaced subscriptions.

If we're going to live in a goods/services/money climate, I'm fine with different companies or media distributors charging subscription fees to pay for their costs. It makes sense, it's been a working model since the early days of the internet.

What started to become a problem is when more and more services went to "free" models. Now the revenue comes from advertisers, so that comes with a train of baggage. Now producers of content are incentivized to make everything a race to see who gets user attention first and fastest for those sweet, sweet clicks. It is the main contributing factor to public attention-span erosion and the way most people have become willfully ignorant about the outside world. Additionally, content has to be moderated and censored because we wouldn't want to scare off the precious advertisers. It's enough to make you want to roblox yourself in minecraft.

Imagine if Youtube broadly was a paid service. You pay premium and there's no algorithm. No "feed based on your marketing preferences." No 20-mile long list of AI slop videos with sensational titles to get you to click on them, because the creators aren't making money from clicks but real subscribers who want to see more of the actual content.

Same with many other huge media sites, even social media. If they weren't beholdened to attention-spans and sensationalism, we would see far less outright propaganda and lies.

I feel like this model has ruined a lot of gaming too, and has allowed publishers to release shitty, unfinished games for free with no moderation for MMO's and no real care or passion for making a game people want to come back to, and instead just make slop games with skins for impulse shoppers.

[–] rav3n@ttrpg.network 10 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

"The internet should be for everyone, except the people I don't like." - average modern internet user

Glad he's able to call out the domain name system for the crock of shit that it is.

[–] JATtho@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago

It's always the fucking DNS. .__.

[–] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 9 points 10 hours ago

The internet isn't broken... Humanity is.

[–] DudeImMacGyver@kbin.earth 23 points 17 hours ago

*web inventor

[–] darkpanda@lemmy.ca 98 points 23 hours ago (27 children)

They kind of fix this in the lede, but dude did not invent the internet, he invented the World Wide Web. The internet is a superset of a whole bunch of things that includes the World Wide Web, but dude wasn’t out there inventing TCP/IP and routers and whatnot.

[–] LittleBorat3@lemmy.world 4 points 12 hours ago

People say wifi when they mean the Internet, somehow one cannot expect accuracy. Articles always get written by professional clueless people also.

[–] HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works 20 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Nowhere does it say he calls himself the creator. I'd be looking at the media for labelling him that.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 12 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

They're replying to the article title, which was incorrect but has now been fixed.

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[–] frisbird@lemmy.ml 41 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

You supported DRM dude. Self critique, renounce your mistakes, and if you really want to go after ICANN, give me a call.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 21 points 21 hours ago

For those that don’t know, he ultimately backed EME which was dumb.

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 9 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

WWW has been a complete crapshow ever since it started simply because it became popular.

It was designed to serve documents over the internet, except everyone co-opted for their own needs like websites, APIs, etc.

That left us with broken as hell crap at every layer from the joke that is HTML/CSS, the clownshow that is HTTP, and the circus that is JavaScript.

And don't even get the started on the mountain of vulnerabilities being stupid obvious crap that wouldn't dare to fly in even basic GNU utilities at the time.

Adding insult to injury, this guy hasn't even provided a valid solution to this mess like hyphanet or the very newly released freenet.

Which by the way tries to hack cheat the system with WebAssembly so that it doesn't have to deal with HTTPS directly since its an exclusive client server protocol.

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