“Father of the World Wide Web,” Tim Berners-Lee, in his memoir This is For Everyone, lamented the monetization of the Internet in recent years, as big tech companies harvested personal data and drove billions of people into content addiction. About this report Bloomberg.
The original idea of Berners-Lee, a physics graduate at Oxford University, was to help CERN computers communicate with each other, but he later switched to finding a way to allow all computers to do this using a system called “the grid”. He created infrastructure, not products, and believed that others would make the Internet work honestly.
Now Berners-Lee regrets that at the dawn of the Internet, no one created a system that allowed small and secure payments. At the same time, according to him, from the very beginning he thought about micropayments for reading an article or watching programs. However, Berners-Lee believes that in this case the Internet “will not become ubiquitous” and he wants to take it global.
The creator of the Internet intended to destroy it
As a result, ads allow free content to be displayed, making people click and scroll endlessly. That also means the new economy is dominated by just a handful of companies, including Google and Amazon. Berners-Lee's Solid project is trying to decentralize user data and wrest control away from big tech platforms, but Solid has so far struggled to compete with ad-based business models due to its limited distribution capabilities.
