Graham Farmelo
Only the most foolhardy person would try to predict the future of the World Wide Web, but that didn’t stop its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, from trying some crystal-ball gazing last week.
During Internet, Web, What Next?, a conference at the Cern atom-smasher laboratory in Geneva, Berners-Lee and others speculated on what they hoped the future might hold for the Web.
What technical improvements are we likely to see in the next few years? Will it become a gigantic marketplace with a few educational add-ons? What will happen if and when governments get their sticky fingers on it?
Berners-Lee still holds on to his vision of a network that users can access with equal ease from anywhere in the world – a single, universal space.
He believes there should always be a place for every conceivable kind of material: the polished, authoritative global site, as well as personal scribblings.
The key advance that he foresees is the use of “metadata” on the Web – information about information.
The idea is that instead of having related files scattered around the Web, which makes retrieval and processing across files difficult and time-consuming, metadata would label files, enabling search engines and other information processors to hunt more effectively for information across different sites. Berners-Lee expects the first clear thinking on metadatabases to emerge towards the end of the year.
In the meantime, Berners-Lee wants to see the development of a more accountable Internet, with more signed documents and more ways of gauging the reliability of information.
He looks forward to a “Web of trust” with an “Oh yeah?” button on every keyboard, enabling browsers to interrogate a database in order to see whether there really is good reason to believe a document is valid and trustworthy.
This should help to make news sites more accountable, an issue that concerns Mark Bernstein, vice-president of CNN Interactive.
At the moment, he says, news sites are a mixed bag, with some poorly checked stories finding their way on to usually reliable pages.
He recalls how several sites recently announced, incorrectly, the death of the comedian Bob Hope. He blames the error, which his site did not make, on a failure to follow basic journalistic checks on a story.
CNN itself is currently re-examining a report it broadcast last month on the use of nerve gas by United States troops in Vietnam in 1970, after they received queries about the story’s veracity.
Nonetheless, Bernstein insists the World Wide Web is fast becoming Internet users’ second news source of choice.
He could hardly restrain himself as he rhapsodised about the success of advertising, which he described as the fastest-growing activity on the Internet, and worth about $1,8-billion (roughly R11,4-billion) annually.
Such potential has now encouraged many governments to consider how to cash in as well, in the form of taxes and tariffs.
At the Cern meeting, Robert Verrue, director general of the European Union’s Directorate General XIII, set out his conciliatory case for a modicum of Internet legislation that would deliver, for example, value-added tax on commercial transactions.
But he will have a tough time of it as the powerful US lobbies push hard for a free market, tax-free Web.
Overall, Berners-Lee seemed wary of the World Wide Web’s future: “Perhaps we might one day look back at these early years of the Web and wonder at what a mess we made.”
After this conference, there is good reason to worry that we might soon be browsing not the Web of trust but the Web of greed.