"If we want to track what government is doing, see
what companies are doing, understand the true state of the
planet, find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, not to mention easily
share our photos with our friends, we the public, the scientific
community and the press must make sure the Web’s principles
remain intact—not just to preserve what we have gained but to
benefit from the great advances that are still to come." - David Berner's-Lee
This man has so much agency concentrated into one person: he has degrees in electronics, engineering, and computer science. He generally knows how to make all the electrons go exactly where he wants.
What he is calling for is a breakdown in the walls of capital's innate need for exclusivity. Unfortunately it is often capital which can afford to pay for skills like his which take a long time to cultivate in the right conditions. If everyone had his skills then everyone could use their security and oversight and faculty and facility to engineer what they needed and it could possibly work better to share the information which everyone would then be able to determine they needed to get and share.
"Allowing any site to link to any other site is necessary but not
sufficient for a robust Web."
He wants royalty-free, tested, open standards for internet design covering every major facet or terminus. And there should be many options for the birth of new facets and termini. I think Berners-Lee is obviously a visionary, he speaks the truth and he's barking up one of the right trees but like most people he's missing the one key tree. It's the tree no one knows how to practically look at and address. It's agency. I have curiousity/hopes that educational models like ITP could spread - but it needs to be accessible and normalized. Then I think the internet would stay free because it would be made of even more people's minds and so it would be even more dynamic and would be less tied to capital infrastructure investments.
The threat to net neutrality is terrifying. What are some technical innovations someone like myself could pursue? Obviously someone should and assumedly is working somewhere on ways to reduce resources required for server and network infrastructure. Food for thought. Also happy he called iTunes out for being a hellish prison.
http://jblomo.github.io/webarch253/slides/Long_Live_the_Web.pdf