Saving the WorldWideWeb

Among the important milestones that led to the creation of the World Wide Web is November 12. About 28 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee his colleague Robert Cailliau published a proposal to create the web. Often confused, there is a difference between the internet and the web. The internet connects the computers while the web connects the content and pages to each other using a common protocol. This is the protocol that Berners-Lee and his colleague created using technologies involving HTTP, URL and HTML. Despite all the advancement, we continue to use three technologies. I heard Berners-Lee at the Web Summit in Lisbon earlier this month as he launched a new global campaign to save the web. The last few years, emerging technologies have begun to influence the web in a way that is undermining its very existence. The web began and has run on mostly utopian ideals. No one owns it but all of us benefit from it. Berners-Lee is creating a campaign to ensure that the web remains “safe, diverse, open and accessible.” In recent years that has changed. Malicious bots are targeting consumers and companies to steal information and funds while corrupting systems. Artificial intelligence is now seen as a “dual use” technology. While the good it does is visible increasingly, its darker side is fearsome too. The Malicious AI report has underlined the tasks ahead. “New attacks may arise through the use of AI systems to complete tasks that would be otherwise impractical for humans. In addition, malicious actors may exploit the vulnerabilities of AI systems deployed by defenders. There is reason to expect attacks enabled by the growing use of AI to be especially effective, finely targeted, difficult to attribute, and likely to exploit vulnerabilities in AI systems,” the report says. Such technologies and bots on the web can suppress dissent and also target commercial rivals. In effect, the web can soon be a war zone with one set of people attacking others. The openness and accessibility of the web has also been in question especially with the attempts by large tech companies and telecom services provides to create gated communities. The war for net neutrality is still on, even though some battles have been won. The attempts to bend the web to serve corporate giants continues across the world. Partly because of such forces, there is a fall in the growth of online access. Berners-Lee run Web Foundation did a study to show that growth has dropped from 19 per cent in 2007 to less than 6 per cent in 2017. Half the world was supposed to be online by 2017, but now this milestone will be reached only by May 2019. Over 3.8 billion people remain unconnected. Most of the unconnected are on the fringes of our societies and economies. For the corporates, these are potential captive users. For dictatorships, these are fodder for propaganda. Berners-Lee and the Web Foundation hope that connecting them will be not done for the benefit of corporates and oppressive regimes.

A set of principles have been prepared to guide the future of the web. These principles include ensuring that governments allow everyone to connect and have privacy. Companies make it accessible and affordable. And citizens collaborate while maintaining civil discourse.

“Governments, companies and citizens will have to agree to a contract for the web,” said Berners-Lee at Lisbon. Human malfeasance, corporate greed and nasty technologies that threaten the web can be fought only with utopian ideals. This is what created the web and such ideals will also save the web. The contract for the web aims to be in place, by the time half the world is connected next year.

This article appeared first in Business Standard on November 15.