What “the internet” means to us today is vastly different from what it meant 20 years ago—let alone in 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee dreamed up HTML, URLs, and the rest of the web’s architecture. Now, the father of the web is trying to restore the internet to its founding spirit of openness. Is he too late? Is such a thing even possible? Julian Lucas isn’t sure, but his profile of Berners-Lee at least reminds us what we’ve lost, and what’s at stake.
Platforms aren’t inherently extractive. Wu defines them as any space that “brings together two or more groups to transact or interact while reducing the costs of doing so.” The internet itself is a platform. But the new web-based platforms were far less neutral. They grew at breakneck speed, and then, once network effects had made them indispensable, they squeezed sellers, served ads, and otherwise extracted value from users while making exit ever costlier. They bought out rivals and turned into monopolies: between 2007 and 2018, Wu notes, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon collectively acquired more than a thousand firms.
Berners-Lee sounded the alarm, warning, as always, about fragmentation: buy a song on iTunes or read a magazine in its proprietary app, and you were no longer on the web. “The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use,” he wrote, in Scientific American, “the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.”
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