The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-looks-to-reinvent-it.html
Although this article is a few years old, it still discusses a highly relevant issue in the World Wide Web, and the social factors that have deviated it from its original intention. The article begins with the premise that what was meant to be tool for scientists at CERN and became a globally connecting network of networks has evolved into the world’s largest surveillance network, deprioritizing privacy over many state and corporate interests. The inventor of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, has expressed his discontent with this devolution of the internet, and has advocated for the decentralization of the network to allow for more peer-to-peer sharing.
Many of the discussions in this article relate to the discussions on power in social networks and network exchange, with the powerful entities being centralized nodes like state governments, or transactional services like Apple iTunes. These centrally located nodes control most of the access to information that externally located nodes see. In picturing a graph for the World Wide Web, the change can be described as fewer ties between ordinary people and more ties instead between people and central hubs. In this case, the item being traded is often information, which could be incredibly damaging if left solely in the hands of the powerful to distribute. To counter this trend, however, computer scientists along with Berners-Lee are working to decentralize the internet by encouraging more ways for peer-to-peer sharing without the use of moderated central hubs, and means of data storage without having to pay fees to large tech companies like Amazon and Google, or decreasing the dominance of Google as a search engine.