Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, being interviewed by Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dophfner Die Welt. In a way, you are the Konrad Zuse for the digital world. Inyou created the World Wide Web, which is basically seen as the ideal for transparency. Do you sometimes feel that this ideal is transforming into a monster?

Over the decades, I changed my answer to that. For the first two decades, I would answer as a matter of principle that, when you look out there, you see humanity. Humanity has good sides and bad sides. The Web has to be an accurate mirror of humanity. Therefore, you will find bad stuff, and you will find good stuff, horrible stuff and glorious stuff. That was my answer for a long time.

So having spent two decades trying to keep the Web open, keep it neutral, assuming that, if humanity has an open and neutral Web, then it will build wonderful things with it, like Wikipedia, etc. It depends what sort of system technically you build on the Web when you build something like a social networking system.

Now, depending on how you design it, it can be lent to a more constructive argument or a less constructive argument. It can be lent to a propagation of wonderful sort or the propagation of hatred. If you were to draw a line through the World Wide Web and digitalization today, would it be more good or more bad?

How did it happen? Some of the biggest inventions happen when scientists are looking for something completely different. Yeah, some of those are very interesting. Viagra was invented against high blood pressure. In this case, no.

So the lack of interoperability between all the systems for handling information was frustrating. CERN was a great place. It was full of wonderful people, full of wonderful different ideas, and it was very diverse. So in a way, it had that problem of diversity and to perhaps a greater extent than most places. I wanted to solve the problem of lack of interoperability.

So I realized that the ideal would be actually to leave people using their existing systems. Could you describe a little bit how long it took to really develop it and how many people had you involved? Was it a big team, or was it basically done in splendid isolation? Well, my boss Mike Sendall, in fact, he had a twinkle in his eye, and he found an excuse for me to do it. The NeXT was a box. It was the thing that Steve Jobs did when he left Apple.

So that was in itself a really interesting creative thing, and he developed that for people to be able to communicate. So Mike said, "Okay. We need to develop something just to test the NeXT box. So the NeXT arrived in in September. I started working in October.

I had the Web working in the end of November, in fact after a couple of months really developing it. Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web. Sorry, from October to November, that would be just two months? That was it, it was a really good development platform. How high was the budget?

It was all unofficial, zero budget, but Mike allowed my 20 percent time to expand to percent time. It was an exponential progress. Over the first year, it grew. The number of hits on our server, my personal server, went up by a factor of The next year, they went up by The following year, they went up by So it was linear if you kept it on a scale of powers of It was exciting, of course, because something that grows that fast was unusual at that point.

One crisis was a challenge with the Gopher project. The University of Minnesota had a project which was a campus-wide information system quite like the Web. It worked on the Internet. That was the end of Gopher on the Internet. So that was a big lesson. That was an opportunity in that the people wanted to know.

They demanded a statement from CERN. So eventually, it was after 18 months of the project start, and on April 30th,CERN made that commitment to a royalty free license. Ten years later, all the members of the Web Consortium, all the industry members, also made a similar commitment to keep it patent free.

So that was, in a way, the crisis of the early Web. Of course, you as an inventor had to be passionate about it.

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How about the other people in the institute or the people that were working with you? Did they understand the vision, or was there also a lot of opposition or criticism? But only in retrospect. And so it spread. I suppose it spread in three dimensions. It spread to people who were interested in hypertext, which was an obscure form of backwater of the computing space, but there were some people who were interested in hypertext. So they were interested.

I developed it on the NeXT, which was really rare. So people who had NeXT machines, they were able to download the thing over the Internet.

And of course, physicists, I really had to try to make it appeal to this specific group. Do you think that CERN was particularly privileged for such an invention, or could that have happened anywhere else?

It had people who had the latest workstations on their desks because CERN would buy very powerful workstations with nice screens for doing the physics. So they ended up being useful to the World Wide Web.

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So it was sort of a bit of a small-scale model of the rest of the world in its diversity, a lot of cultures, lots of different computer systems. So it had sort of the frustration of these incompatibilities. So it takes something very diverse. Is there any advice that you could give to young people who have crazy ideas, who want to invent something great?

Well, CERN was a fortuitous place to be, but also, was a fortuitous time. The Internet was just coming. Here in Berlin, across a lot of the world, it was a time of massive change. The communities, the universities were getting actually connected together. I benefited from the work that Internet designers had done in building it as an open platform. You can be very creative.

Why did you decide not to patent your invention? I knew from the beginning the goal was always to have one Web. It could never get to a global standard. So it was not a moral decision at all. It was a hard-nosed pragmatic decision, yes. Did you ever think about how the Internet would look today without the World Wide Web? Perhaps as a kind of military tool for very few people?

We can never know. But would you agree that, basically, the World Wide Web transformed the basic invention of the Internet into a mass market success? Well, the Internet allowed any two computers to communicate. The World Wide Web provided an information space for humanity to be connected. Because it was easy enough for ordinary people to use, it then pushed the Internet to people who in the geeky days would never have thought about buying a computer.

You can remember what it was like with America Online, for example, perhaps the most successful of the walled gardens, but there were lots of them.

There were dial-up bulletin boards, I think like Prodigy and Delphi, and then AOL was one. Each of those tried to be the single place that you go to for everything. When the Web came along, AOL got into trouble to a certain extent, first, they tried to pretend that the Web was a small thing and really part of AOL. Then people realized that AOL is part of the Web. However much effort they put into the walled garden, it could never compete with the crazy creativity.

Before we go to the walled gardens of today: I was certainly advised. WW was too much of a mouthful, but it was useful. Nobody else had thought of WWW, and it was unique.

So we could count the number of Web servers, for example, just by counting the number of computers called www. Did you consider any alternatives for the branding of this idea? I considered a few, well, Mine of Information. I called it The Information Mine because Mine of Information just in English is colloquial, conveys richness of things, of contents, but The Information Mine is TIM, which was a little bit too egocentric.

When the project was finished, did you realize that you developed something very big or was it more like: Intel stock marketwatch is still an interesting project. What are all the things we have to do to keep this project on track?

The World Wide Web is now stable. How close are we today to your original vision of it, and how far are we away from that? When people gave talks about the Web initially, the search engines were the butt of all the jokes because their results were terrible. But then the Google guys discovered this algorithm which looked at the links instead of the words. When did you meet the Google boys first?

I met Larry Page back a few years ago. But not in the how to make money selling balloons days. No, not at all. During those boom days, nobody had time to talk to anybody. Lots of things have happened that I could never have imagined.

For example, the first maps that Steve Putz of Xerox PARC made were really clunky. You had to click to move the app, the whole thing. Then later on, you could switch the maps around. What is the best thing so far that you have seen happening with and because of the World Wide Web and what is the worst? One example of the system not really working as designed was the interaction between the for-pay advertising system and political fidelity total stock market funds last year when these guys in Veles, Macedonia, just had websites where they were trying to attract traffic.

They were using the Google Ad system. So Google would financially reward them very quickly if they could get more people to follow the links and click on more links. So these people during the election season, they ended up finding that, if you just wanted to tweet out a headline and get somebody to click on it, then the US election is definitely a great topic.

Then the Google Ad system trained indian stock market desktop widget just like you train a dog. In a way, it just gave them more money for the things which were more clickable. So they learned that untruth was more clickable than truth.

I think it was found out that Uber is tracking your movements not only while you are using the product, but they identify you or rather your mobile phone by means of a sort of digital fingerprint even if you deleted the app at some point. A sign is seen during a news conference to announce Uber resumes ride-hailing service, in Taipei Thomson Reuters.

I believe that privacy is really fundamental to all. Or they say that he who has nothing to hide has nothing to fear. That attitude is very sinister, but also, the idea that we have privacy only for things which we feel guilty about. Any company has things it discusses within the company. It can plan its new products. It can look at its successes and failures. If that is defined by other people, by political authorities, or by companies, actually, I think it is changing our model of free democracies.

Would you agree that total transparency can lead to totalitarianism? The public is paying for it. So there is a duty of transparency. I think that Germany has been a inr us dollar exchange rate leader for the rest of the world in that case and so should hang in there.

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In a way, you could say there have been two iconic and culture-defining experiences in America and in Europe regarding privacy. It is an example how total transparency was used an abused by the Nazis. They knew who was Jewish, where which Jews were living, what they did und thought. They registered and tracked each and every one of them, they even tattooed a number on their arms before putting them in a concentration camp.

That was unlimited control, totalitarian transparency. You know everything about your potential enemies, which means you know everything about your own population.

You spy on everything because that is considered to be the best way to avoid terrorism and ensure security. So it may be that these two traumatic experiences led to very different conclusions. Here is a deeply rooted sensitivity how to paper trade forex online training too much transparency, there it cannot be enough transparency.

How do you experience these differences in mentality when talking to your colleagues in England and in the Silicon Valley? So it is interesting to live half and half. When it came to open data, both the UK and the US were pretty good leaders. When it comes to privacy, then I think, to a certain extent, as I said, Europe has done better, but there are strong privacy guarantees in the States.

The strongest things are the things that are constitutionally based. The most interesting example recently, when a loudspeaker manufacturer was taken to court, because when you listen to the speaker, if you use Spotify on your phone, you could hand off the Spotify playlist to that speaker using Spotify Connect, and then the speaker would then call option formula with dividends it by itself.

So the speaker would know which songs you were playing, and the speaker was reporting the songs to Bose, the manufacturer of the loudspeaker.

So we noticed it. I tweeted about it. So that is an example. They were successfully sued under wiretap laws, and they appealed to a high court, and they lost.

So basically, the idea that you can do what Uber does, I think that the wiretap law is basically the interception of messages, and the interception of data is illegal in the States.

Some peope might be surprised, mainly because you can hardly be blamed for being anti-progress or anti-technology. Is it the company? Is it the legal system of a market, a country? I think that these developments are posing a whole set of completely new questions. I think, by the way, that whereas initially it might be an AI, and then it may be the company, at the end of the day, the arbiter has to be the court system.

But was does that mean for 777 binary options on gold news?

How do they define fake news in this case? That means that, in the end, Facebook or another social media platform can define what fake news is, and I think it should always be the prosecutor and not a private company. Facebook should be a neutral platform. People exchange all kinds of things, good and bad, truth and lies. However, only if something is illegal, the prosecutor should intervene.

If Facebook with its almost two billion users — ushered by well-intentioned politicians — morphs into a universal media monopoly making editorial decisions and even judging on who gets to read what, then we have a problem.

And it is exacerbated if that happens in a closed system. We know about monopolies. Before the Web, there was the telephone system. But then they changed that and increased the amount of competition. There was AOL, of course, which was pretty much a monopoly pre-Web. When the Web started, people were worried Netscape was far and away the most popular browser. Why were they ever worried about it? Bring Netscape back in. So they worried about Google. Some, still worry about Google, but did tim berners lee make any money from the internet some, they stopped worrying about Google because, forex master trader forum, what people do is they Google Facebook, and they go to Facebook, and they spend the entire day on Facebook.

There have always been monopolies. They have always how much does it cost to sell shares on scottrade an issue. They have not always been permanent. No, almost no monopoly in the history of business has been permanent. In the long run, neither Standard Oil nor Bell Seputar forex kurs hari ini Company survived as monopolies.

Most of the monopolies were disrupted by competition, but in some cases, the regulator could help and had to help. Peter Thiel wrote that book on monopolies with an underlying theory or main theory that monopolies are for winners, and competition is for losers. Where is the balance? What should the regulator do in dealing with monopolies, basically leave it up entirely to the market because the market will resolve it in the long run, or restrict the dominant positions of certain players?

I think the antitrust system is really important. Is there a particular challenge for the digital world because of the effects of the network economy?

But if you let a player go that way too long, then the combination of monopolies with a search algorithm, with a browser, with devices and everything, can be simply too dominant. I think one of the nice things about the digital world is the fact that the Internet was net neutral. The net was built as a neutral space without attitude.

So the markets for the websites, the markets for content, the wide markets for whatever you build on top of the Web have been independent of the market for connectivity. So you could choose to get fiber at your house from a competing market without that affecting which movies you can watch tonight, so different from the American paid cable system, which the net replaced.

How about the whole fake news phenomenon? How should society deal with that? Should publishers help Facebook to correct their fake news stories, or is it basically more about media education, that people should learn that not everything that is distributed on a social media platform is necessarily true? I think we have to be very scientific and look at how these systems interact.

The Macedonian websites we talked about earlier generated ad revenue by making up things about the US election, and affected that election even though their motivation was not at all political, only commercial. The ad network trained them that lies can generate more revenue than truth. So you could say the fact that Facebook is incentivizing people to distribute bad content, fake news, has to be changed in the very interest of the social media platform.

The guys in Veles, Macedonia, they were indepenentthey were not on Facebook. They were only on websites. They pointed at them with Twitter. That is targeted advertising. Targeted advertising on social networks is very effective. He claimed that what they did was divided the entire American voting population into 32 different subtypes, like Myers-Briggs, different sorts of people, different demographics, and so they could then send targeted information.

So one simple rule could be that you could say, actually, targeted advertising by political bodies is not democratic. You said at the very beginning that you think net-net, of course, the World Wide Web and the whole digitization of our society has more positive elements than negative ones, but among the negative ones, which is your biggest worry?

A Turkey national flag is hung on a balcony in Istiklal Street near the scene of Saturday's bomb explosion, in Istanbul, Sunday, March 20, I used to say blocking and spying and Web censorship. The censorship, of course, is bad, but if censorship is bad, spying is worse. Is there a government that is particularly worrying you? Turkey is a classic example of blocking. They blocked Twitter, and they put it back on. And now they block Wikipedia.

That will be a battle. Some of the Middle Eastern countries have been pretty reprehensible in the past when it comes to spying on people and using that to round up their critics. Governments and their possibilities to manipulate and abuse data is one thing.

The other thing is big international conglomerates that could also end up in the hands of certain governments. How do you see that? The first ring is governments, but the second ring is big companies, or are you less afraid by the role that big corporations are playing? Yes, they have a faith in corporations but are taught as children to distrust their government. I think the British contingent will end up overtrusting their government, and the Americans will end up overtrusting their corporations.

In the free market, yeah. And free market needs competition. It does need competition. It does need to have a separate market for connectivity and for content. To which degree will virtual reality, augmented reality change the Web and change the world? Is it hype, or is it a game changer?

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In when we had the first Web conference at CERN, one of the sessions was on virtual reality, and it was on designing Virtual Reality Markup Language VRML. They would just be so much more interesting. Augmented reality will increase. Virtual reality, I think it would be great fun to try a world in which you and I can have this conversation. Without being in the same room. It is really happening like a virtual reality conversation where you basically meet without being in the same room?

I think a lot of people do that now. A lot of people meet on Skype and Facetime. Then different things become a concern when most of sub-Saharan Africa villages are online, when 3G, 4G, 5G cell towers will be ubiquitous. There will be low earth orbit satellites, for example or something or balloons, but there has to be a new push to get them online.

That push may have to be subsidized because those people will be in remote areas. So a widening gap? But so far, until today, you could find very good facts and figures to prove the opposite theory, that digitization has closed the gap or that digitization has redistributed money from the wealthy to the not wealthy.

Basically, if you look to the developing countries, they are more and more benefiting from digitization with regard to the accessibility of knowledge and the distribution of wealth. No, I was talking about the last 10 percent.

So as they benefit, yes, then the benefit to humanity is lots and lots of people can get healthcare information. You might also look at where some of that money has all gone, and you might be very concerned about the economic distribution in the developed countries, which is worse than ever before.

The historian Yuval Harari just wrote a book called Homo Deus, where he basically says that mankind has had to deal for the last centuries with three main challenges.

That was war, famine, and plagues. He said that these things are basically resolved. More people are dying from too much sugar than from not enough food. Never in history were less people dying from war and violence.

Is that something that you take seriously? So do you think, like Elon Musk, that there is a likelihood that artificial intelligence is going to be smarter than human intelligence and is going to win the battle? I find it very hard to argue against that, yes. So a last question, in that context: Or is it more purely medical progress that makes it easier for people to live longer? I think machine intelligence will help.

Timothy Berners-Lee is a living legend as an inventor of something that really has changed the world. Has that ever put pressure on you?

Did it cause certain crises about your next projects or scientific research or invention? Well, my day job for many years has been as the Director of W3C, and that has been a great community of people. Konrad Zuse invented the computer. A webpage is now something you can program. Most of the time, in day-to-day life, people at W3C just know me as this guy who has got certain sometimes annoying personal feelings about how the architecture of the Web should be.

Is there anything that is particularly on top of your mind? The idea is that we imagine a world in which you completely control your data. I read all kinds of stuff, but I suppose I rarely read a book from beginning to end. I get pointed at so many things. I follow a few news sources on Twitter of reliable news.

Random people introduce me to things. Is there any book that changed your life? It would be tempting to talk about Enquire Within Upon Everything, but really, that was just the title of the book. Do you believe in God? Not in the sense of most people. Thank you very much. Read the original article on Die Welt. Follow Die Welt on Twitter.

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