Digital Dialogue: 'The Internet isn't free'
International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 2006
DIGITAL DIALOGUE

Highlights from iht.com's online conversation with readers around the world

Last week on Digital Dialogue, the IHT's technology Web log, we invited readers to send in questions for Tim Berners-Lee, who established the programming language of the Web in 1989 with colleagues at CERN, the European science institute.

In an interview with Victoria Shannon in Edinburgh, Berners-Lee answered many of these. A full transcript is available here.

Is it inevitable that the Internet will become a fee-paying service, given the pressure from telecommunications companies and others? If so, is it feasible, technically speaking, for a parallel, free World Wide Web to be established?

C.W. Iuliano

That is a good question, but it's slightly confused. The Internet isn't free when you use free in the sense of "zero-cost." However, the Internet is free in the sense of "freedom." When I have paid to connect to the Internet and you have paid to connect to the Internet, the rule is that you and I can communicate. You don't have to make a special arrangement with my Internet service provider.

Potentially in the United States - but only, as far as I understand it, in the United States - is the idea that for high-speed Internet connections capable of handling video, the telecommunications companies would try to change the rules, so that if the International Herald Tribune has a video Web site and I have a browser that can do video, I would only be able to browse your video blog if you had paid my cable company some money. And that would be serious.

I don't think it's inevitable. In fact, I am fairly confident that people will realize that the immense power of the Internet comes from its openness and that the value of what's on the Web comes from its diversity.

Unless we have the neutrality of the medium that we've enjoyed up until now, unless that continues for TV and audio streaming, that richness, that diversity will die, and it will be a sad day. I'm sure the public will push for the real Internet.

It would be technically feasible, of course, but it would be a terrible waste of resources, in fact. Also, the value of a Web link, whether it's to or from video or text, is that it can point to anywhere. If the Web were divided into two noninterconnected pieces, they would both be irreparably harmed.

Is it true you admitted to getting sub- domains backwards? Luke Smith, FreeCulture.org

I'm not responsible for domain names. However, a part of me wishes the [Web address] structure had been different. Here, let me write it down: http:com/iht/news/2006/05, et cetera. No double-slash - duh! Double slashes can be assumed. We can just use the colon instead. Missing off the double- slash is something I definitely wish I had done. And taking the domain names, turning them around and making them look like the paths, with slashes, would mean that when you set up that URL, you could choose whether your server was actually news.iht.com or iht.com/news, and the browser would figure out which of those it was. It would mean you'd be able to deploy servers more flexibly. It would have been more consistent, kind of neater. We try to get these things neat and tidy - sometimes we're just too tentative. It's partly to make things look like they look elsewhere. It would have meant easier coding, too.

Where are we in semantic Web development right now?$@

The semantic Web is making the transition from being an exciting new technology picked up by early adopters to becoming a mainstream technology.

In different fields, it's in different phases. In some places, like library metadata, it was picked up by groups and digital library systems very early on. Now, we're finding that the hotbed of semantic Web development is the life sciences community. In life sciences, drug discovery companies are finding that the semantic Web is very exciting for overcoming the stovepipe-approach systems they have.

So we're seeing large companies as well as small start-ups bringing out semantic Web-based products.

But, still, what we haven't seen yet is existing products coming out in new versions with semantic Web interfaces. Your money management program doesn't export its data as semantic Web data, your calendar doesn't export your data as semantic Web data. There are conversion programs to adapt legacy data to semantic Web data, but we've still got a long way to go.

Where do you see the Net in 10 to 20 years in an ideal future? Matthew Collins

In the ideal future, the Web still has its universality. You can access it from any hardware, you can access it from any software, you can access it no matter what language you speak, what character set you write in, whether you write up, down or sideways.

You can access things whether they are scribbled notes or very finely polished material. You can access documents, and you can access data.

In our ideal world, you can pay for greater or lower bandwidth, and you can pay for greater or lower quality of service. But whatever level you pay for, you have access to everybody else who has paid to connect to the Internet.

Ten to 20 years from now, when there's something you find that you want to watch out for out there in this mass of data, you have programs that you may or may not call agents that will track those events and do the appropriate thing when they occur.

We'll have a very powerful collaborative space. So we'll have a lot of remote working, with maybe 3D videoconferencing, which will be a mixture of a virtual world of visualization for data and documents and the presence and the virtual presence of people. We'll have spaces in which we can build things together, rather than build them individually and comment on each other's.

When I'm looking for some information, it's very easy for me to get the feel for what its source was, whether it's a source I trust or I don't trust. There is a well-defined and recently formed international consensus on privacy expectations.

Software that people use to operate on the Web can be held accountable - it's to a certain extent transparent, so if a company or a person violates the policies on privacy expectations, then they can be challenged for what they've done and how they've done it and where they got the information from. Society has found a balance between generally allowing a large amount of individual freedom but with enough visibility to apply penalties in serious cases.