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WARNING: LONG POST
The Book of the Week is “This Is for Everyone, The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web” by Tim Berners-Lee (hereinafter referred to as TBL), published in 2025. In this hodgepodge / bragfest / advertisement for his company’s services, the author (who has bragging rights only insofar as the World Wide Web was his idea) recounted how he actually helped change the world. Americans might balk at the English mentality of TBL. He constantly claimed that the internet should not be a profit-seeking entity, but at the same time, he was woefully naive in saying that the capitalistic side-effects of it that are evil, can be reversed.
IT IS ALWAYS TOO LATE TO REGULATE ANY TRENDING TECHNOLOGY BECAUSE ITS NEGATIVE EFFECTS AREN’T SEEN UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE!
The author came across as an idealist, one of three kinds of major world-influencers. The other two are the pragmatist, and the strongman. The first kind is like Bernie Sanders– generous to a fault, desirous of creating a utopian world. The next is like Barack Obama– acknowledges the reality that there are haters and evildoers who will “poison the well” in their misdirected rage. So he picks his battles and compromises with the angry nasty haters, etc., BUT– he’s a peacenik, not a pacifist– until the tide can be reversed. The strongman kind is well known; his initials are DJT.
TBL was born in London in 1955. He related a (rather fanciful– to the reader) anecdote about how the Web could educate people in all different countries. In the early 2010’s, a centuries-old farming technique used in the African country of Burkina Faso was translated into various languages and put on video on the Web when an NGO gave a farmer a smart phone.
Other farmers in his area, and as far away as Mali and Niger allegedly learned the technique from him. The reclaimed land (which was thought too arid to be farmed) provided enough food to nourish an estimated three million people. The reader might ask: Over the decades, why haven’t NGO’s helped farmers in that region, albeit a little less efficiently, prior to that??
One answer might be, that nations in Africa have the same kinds of problems as those of Haiti, in terms of feeding their people [See this blog’s post, “Haiti After the Earthquake”].
Anyway, in describing how he pushed for his idea of the World Wide Web, TBL was far from comprehensive in naming specific entities and people that and who were major influencers along the way; among the omitted: ICANN, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Julian Assange, Loebner Prize, WHOIS.com, etc.
TBL repeatedly circled back to “Solid” which is his company, that sells a “pod” based on his idea of a kind of electronic account that links ALL personal data– financial, medial and whatever else an individual user wants to keep there. Yes, it’s maximally efficient and the user has full control over all privacy settings. BUT it’s at high risk for maximally efficient theft of ALL personal data– financial, medical and whatever else the individual user is keeping there! No social engineering required.
Sooner or later, there will be a disgruntled or incompetent employee at Solid, who will not even need to be a hacker!! Even secure servers, obviously, wouldn’t prevent the data from disappearing in the event of a Crowdstrike (honest ineptitude) type crash.
Solid is going to end up like Bitcoin. It was created for the Silicon Valley set, and will spread to their family and friends, and perhaps to a few ordinary Americans, because TBL is more concerned about privacy and efficiency than security. Americans are hyper-aware of all three. Further, when TBL was asked whether Ed Snowden was a hero or a villain, he said hero. So even when the world was made aware of the US and UK governments’ abuses regarding spying with software, no watchdog groups changed Big Brother’s behavior. In fact, it got worse.
Another cringeworthy electronic service the author also described, was a chatbot named Charlie. The author provided a sample conversation between Charlie and a user, in which Charlie was condescending. The author described the negative psychological effects of evil social media, but also (blissfully unaware of his hypocrisy) proudly proclaimed that everyone should have a personal AI friend like Charlie.
One way AI is making positive medical advances is in diagnoses of patients. The software is more accurate than human doctors. It has multiple regression analysis behind it– statistics handled by software that, in the past would have taken humans years to calculate by hand for diagnosing one patient!
Additionally, TBL discussed the newest version of chat rooms or forums, in which there are rules for civil discourse. Good luck with that, all. Perhaps moderators can keep the peace in user-discussions, but governments can’t regulated users’ behavior or user-related policies set forth by the companies on the internet. They’re global 24/7.
There is no global government. The UN comes close, and it’s better than nothing, at attempting to keep the world civil. What the US government can regulate is business-related crimes that deal with anti-trust issues, financial and securities matters and data breaches. The trouble is, politicians financially benefit from lack of regulation of the internet companies, as the companies are political donors.
Read the book to learn much more about entities, people, issues and controversies in connection with the Web’s evolution, including but far from limited to: the Web Foundation; intellectual property rights; deepfakes; and lest it be forgotten, 23andMe’s bankruptcy filing in 2025 when the data ownership question reared its ugly head yet again.