robert matthews says the father of the web is wrong to worry about his offspring |
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee is worried about his 15-year-old progeny. Who isn't? The reason the rest of us should care is that the source of Sir Tim's worries is the World Wide Web, which he brought into the world in 1991.
Apparently Sir Tim fears that failure to understand the societal impact of the Web could mean "we will end up with things that are very bad".
This is a bizarre statement: has Sir Tim really just woken up to the torrent of porn, spam and poisonous ranting unleashed by his now-ubiquitous invention? Not at all: it is just that, as a staunch supporter of free speech, he does not see these as "things that are very bad". What worries him is something altogether more high-minded: the abuse of the web by "undemocratic" powers.
This is all a bit vague, and suggests Sir Tim is coming down with Dr Frankenstein |
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| Sir Tim seems to have forgotten his own hands-off approach ensured the success of the web |
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syndrome: a dread of having unleashed something on the world that turns out to do more harm than good. Einstein suffered from it following his discoveries about nuclear energy. Sir Alec Jeffreys, inventor of DNA fingerprinting, also seems to have fallen prey to it.
Whatever the cause, Sir Tim has unveiled a research project to study the impact of the web. And its deliberations will reportedly "have a direct influence on the future development of the World Wide Web".
We should all hope they don't. Sir Tim seems to have forgotten it was his own hands-off approach that ensured the success of the Web in the first place. In the early 1990s, computer scientists in the US had something similar called Gopher. But it failed precisely because busybodies stuck their oar in.
On balance, the web is brilliant - but not so brilliant that it cannot be wrecked by the well-meaning. 
FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 2, 2006
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