Berners-Lee Warns Facebook Could Harm The Web

The web is being threatened by the success of social networking sites, which wall off information from the rest of the world, and governments which want to monitor or censor activity online, according to the web’s creator.

Facebook and other sites, along with governments, are among the threats facing the World Wide Web, according to a Scientific American essay by Sir Tim Berners  Lee, who created it at the CERN nuclear physics laboratory, almost exactly 20 years ago in 1990.

Open Standards, or closed worlds?

As created by Berners-Lee, the web was intended to be a dynamic place where ideas and content could be shared. It now faces several threats, said the scientist, who holds professorships at MIT and Southampton University, and is director of the World Wide Web consortium.

Social networking sites keep data off the open web, said Sir Tim Berners-Lee in the essay: “Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the web, but your data are not.”

Other sites refuse to use standard web addresses. “Apple’s iTunes system, for example, identifies songs and videos using URIs that are open,” said Berners-Lee. “But instead of ‘http:’ the addresses begin with ‘itunes:,’ which is proprietary.” This is bad, he explains, because “you are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace.”

Censorship and restriction

Berners-Lee also expressed concern over threats to net neutrality, warning that a deal between Google and Verizon might result in mobile phone traffic being downgraded on the Internet. “Many people in rural areas from Utah to Uganda have access to the Internet only via mobile phones; exempting wireless from net neutrality would leave these users open to discrimination of service.”

Snooping, for instance by the Phorm software, is another danger, said Berners-Lee: “Accessing the information within an Internet packet is equivalent to wiretapping a phone or opening postal mail.”

Government intervention in the form of censorship and restriction is also a threat, said Berners-Lee, warning that, in  France’s Hadopi law and the UK’s Digital Economy Act, “no due process of law protects people before they are disconnected or their sites are blocked.”

“Given the many ways the web is crucial to our lives and our work, disconnection is a form of deprivation of liberty,” said Berners-Lee.

Although the web needs our vigilance, Berners-Lee believes threats from social networking sites, will pass away,  comparing Facebook to early ISPs like AOL, which attempted to restrict users to their own material in the 1990s.

“These closed, ‘walled gardens,’ no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing web market outside their gates,” said Berners-Lee. “If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.”