The Internet is broken and the inventor of the World Wide Web wants to fix it

"This Is for Everyone reads like a family newsletter: it tells you what happened, recounting the Internet's origin and evolution in great detail, but rarely explaining why the ideal of a decentralized Internet was not realized. Berners-Lee's central argument is that the web has strayed from its founding principles and been corrupted by profit-driven companies that seek to monetize our attention. But it's still possible to "fix the internet", he argues, outlining a utopian vision for how that might be done."

"In it, social media would be designed to "maximize the joy" the user experiences instead of fuelling division, and technical standards would be introduced to prevent the mistakes of the social-media era from being repeated in the age of artificial intelligence. Both ideas are optimistic - some might say naive - but coming from someone so integral to the web's creation, they carry particular weight."

The World Wide Web originated at CERN as a side project that managers tolerated grudgingly. The web grew into a deeply embedded global system that reshaped daily life. The web has strayed from founding decentralized principles and been corrupted by profit-driven, attention-monetizing companies. Reform proposals include designing social media to maximize user joy rather than fuel division and introducing technical standards to prevent repeating social-media era mistakes in the age of artificial intelligence. The vision for remediation is optimistic and utopian. The historical account traces decades of work across institutions and recounts the web’s origins and evolution.

Read at Nature