The web has fallen under the influence of a bad crowd

The pioneering British computer scientist Mary Lee Berners-Lee, who passed away in 2017, had a wonderful motto to describe her family’s parenting style: watchful neg-ligence. One should always keep an eye on one’s children but must never smother their curiosity or creativity.

That philosophy was put to brilliant effect when her eldest son, Tim, invented the world wide web 30 years ago this week. His decision to keep the web open and free created an extraordinary playground for human ingenuity that has profoundly influenced what billions of people believe today and how they interact.

“The idea of the design was that it should be universal,” Sir Tim told me in an interview. “It is that universality that has led to it having a ridiculous amount of stuff on it.”

But over the past decade the web has increasingly fallen under the influence of a bad crowd as authoritarian states, giant companies and criminals have colonised vast tracts of digital space. Cyber crime, electoral hacking and behavioural manipulation have exploded on the web, degrading our societies and democracies.

“The time for watchful negligence may be over,” Sir Tim concedes. To revive the original promise of the web, he suggests, “We now need people with vision making a very calculated effort in an extremely deliberate way.”

Three things would help. First, we desperately need to devote more effort to understand better the myriad ways in which the web is affecting our lives. Just as environmentalists monitor and model global warming, so we now need to think about the interconnecting complexities of “social climate change”, as Sir Tim calls it.

The nascent multidisciplinary field of web science, pulling together computer scientists, economists, sociologists and many others, needs a boost. Encouragingly, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has just launched a $1bn college of computing, is making a big effort to produce more “bilingual” experts, who understand both technology and the humanities.

A clearer understanding of web science would help us focus on the second essential task: improving our watchfulness. Many governments appear woefully ignorant about the dynamics of the information age and so ill-equipped to devise appropriate regulation, competition, privacy protection and tax-ation policies. Many big tech companies remain partially blind to the damaging societal impact of their services because their profits depend on their myopia.

The World Wide Web Foundation’s “contract for the web”, published last year, may be somewhat fuzzy. But it has at least stirred the debate about where the rights and responsibilities of governments, companies and citizens lie. But it would be a mistake to believe that the web has somehow reached its end state. It is perhaps better viewed as a never-ending process that must be continually reinvented and improved. That constitutes the third big challenge.

For the moment, as Southampton University’s Wendy Hall and Kieron O’Hara have written, the “splinternet” is divided into four models: the original libertarian model; the commercial model dominated by big tech companies; the regulated European model; and the digital authoritarian model developed by China. The 3bn people in the world yet to come online, mostly scattered across the remoter regions of Asia and Africa, seem likely to connect to a variant of that authoritarian model.

But other futures are possible. Indeed, Sir Tim is himself helping to build an alternative data architecture that would radically change the way the digital economy works. The Solid project he has led at MIT envisages a digital world in which we all control our own data though personal online data stores (Pods).

For the moment, the Balkanised nature of the web means that people’s data are spread between several “walled gardens” owned by the big tech companies. That not only jeopardises our privacy but also impedes the optimal use of the data. “It is stopping us doing wonderful, creative things if we had access to that data and had control over it,” Sir Tim says.

How the web evolves over the next 30 years is likely to play a far bigger role in shaping our future than are any of our present obsessions over Brexit, US border walls or China’s Belt and Road Initiative. We remain strangely fixated on 20th-century conceptions of national sovereignty while the nature of 21st-century digital sovereignty is being rewritten offstage in complex computer protocols. It is time to be far more watchful, and far less negligent.

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