Berners-Lee Founds World Wide Web Foundation

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee yesterday announced the formation of the World Wide Web Foundation, an organization dedicated to keeping the Web free and open and to extending the benefits of the Web to greater numbers of people.

The founding of The Web Foundation is an interesting and important step in the evolution of the Internet but it marks frustration felt by many of the people who started and fostered the dominant culture of sharing on the Internet. The ways the Web has unfolded puts it far from the idealistic aspirations of its founders.

One of the problems Berners-Lee sees with the Web as it exists today is a dangerous lack of credibility. Another is a continuing lack of access to nearly 4/5 of the world’s population. While the Web Foundation might not be able to make information on the Web more credible or build communications infrastructure in the developing world, it can have a lot of clout regarding Web standards and the philosophies they develop from.

Berners-Lee chairs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body that sets coding standards for Web development. Beside him is Steve Bratt, current CEO of the W3C. Bratt will be assuming the title of CEO at the Web Foundation in early 2009. Being two of the creators, Berners-Lee and Bratt are among the most respected and influential voices in tech. In trying to reform the results of his creation however, Berners-Lee might be taking on his biggest challenge yet. The Foundation appears to be an attempt to bring the Web back to its roots.

Originally, the Internet was designed to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers and scientists. The first actual web site was posted on August 6, 1991 by Berners-Lee when he worked for CERN. Very quickly an information culture made up of those who were already similarly informed was formed.

Science is the realm of ideas. Originally, scientists shared their ideas with each other for free. The Web was limited to a small group of people who were suddenly empowered to share and access data. This culture, combined with radically increased computational speed and storage capacity, has underpinned the greatest period of scientific advancement in human history.

That benefit was obvious enough in 1991. By then, the Internet had already allowed an extremely small group of scientists surrounding CERN to share information in ways and with speed few of them dreamed possible a decade earlier. Surely, as the thinking went, opening the Internet to the general public would lead to a similar surge in cultural and personal developments.

Those were heady days. The cold-war had just ended and two generations who had grown up under the fear of imminent nuclear war finally felt they were in a position to believe in and make great changes in the world. They were successful. The Internet has certainly made great change in the world.

The Internet has fully opened what Arindam Bhattacharya, a director at the Boston Consulting Group in New Delhi, first called the Third Wave of Globalization. In 1985 approximately 90% of people in India were, by western standards, living in dire poverty. Today, over 40% of the population earn enough to live a relatively middle-class lifestyle. Similarly, the Chinese economy has benefited enormously from instant and easier access to the global market. The ability to reach far beyond any geographic location has altered the lives of hundreds of millions of people in places as far ranging as Pakistan, Pretoria and Pasadena.

At the same time, the Web has given voice to virtually anyone. The credibility of information on the Web is always suspect and the nature of open, free access to everyone poses increasing credibility challenges. Berners-Lee recently cited the mass-paranoia suggesting the Large Hadron Collider at CERN could create a black hole which would quickly consume the Earth. To exemplify, in an interview with the BBC, Berners-Lee noted,

“On the Web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable. A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging.”

Aside from cults, un-credible information on the Internet can cause great damage. Last week, an out-of-date news story which appeared in Google News results as if it was a fresh story caused a fifteen minute run on United Airlines stock, pushing the value of the company down by over a billion dollars until shares rebounded later the same day.
Berners-Lee and the Web Foundation discussed applying some sort of credibilty rating system to web documents however they found the issue to complicated. In the same BBC interview, Berners-Lee said,

“I’m not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways,” he said. “So I’d be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.”

This is something search marketers might want to think about. Aside from the judgement of Google or of individual users, what exactly constitutes a gauge of credibility on the web?

The second set of goals for the Web Foundation, making the Web more accessible to the developing world, are easier to envision. While the high-tech infrastructure that runs the Web might not be available in most of the developing world, mobile telephone technology has made enormous inroads in places traditional phone lines don’t stretch.

Only 1/5 of the world has functional Internet access today. The Web Foundation believes that through streamlined code for mobile, the fraction of Earth’s population with access can easily grow into a majority.

As the global market expands and technology allows for stronger mobile devices, much of the business of search marketing moves to the mobile web. In this regard, the work of the Web Foundation is, for search marketers, worth following and contributing to. It might have a direct effect on how the mobile web develops.

Berners-Lee has traditionally resisted the development of coding standards specific only to mobile devices. He opposed the development of the .mobi protocol saying in a December 2007 interview with Dataquest magazine that all information needed to be commonly accessable regardless of platform.

“It is important that if I refer to something like train timetable for example and if I bookmark it using my phone, I can view it on my computer screen. Hence, it very important that the same URI works on different devices. The problem with .mobi, I didn’t want to have a domain that limited accessibility from certain devices, small devices in this regard. Then this would mean that, there would be a different URI for the computer and mobile devices. I fail to understand the need for it. The important thing is that the same URI should work, I don’t want to keep track of two URI for same thing, and I do not want to keep two bookmarks of same thing, depending on whether I am using my computer or my mobile device. It is very pragmatical engineering reason.”

Eighteen years ago, Tim Berners-Lee bound the hypertext transfer protocol to the TCP/IP protocol thus inventing the World Wide Web. His super-highway of good intentions is, by his perception, under threat from the hellish forces of control and human nature. The founding of the Web Foundation is clearly his way of trying to bolster his vision of a truly global network controlled by the billions who use it. That clarity of vision is outlined in the Web Foundation’s mission statement:

“The World Wide Web Foundation (“Web Foundation”) is the next phase of fulfilling Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision: the Web as humanity connected by technology. The [Foundation] seeks:

• to advance One Web that is free and open,
• to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,
• and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.”

It will be interesting to watch the Foundation evolve and wise for the search marketing sector to assit in its evolution.