Five myths about the web
The history of the web includes some persistent myths and comically naive predictions.
As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the world wide web, it gets more and more difficult to imagine life without it.
And although our world certainly has been transformed by the web’s capabilities, its history includes some persistent myths and comically naive predictions.
Myth No 1 We know who invented the web and the internet, and when
Ask Google who invented the web and the internet, and it will give you an answer. But the concept of ‘‘invention’’ does not map well to the actual histories of these technologies, which arose from collaborations among large numbers of people and whose development features very few moments that were obvious transformations.
The history of the web has one singular figure, Tim Berners-lee, who wrote the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to format textbased documents, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to send documents across the internet, and a software program to view or browse pages.
But Berners-lee did not sit down one day and create the internet. There were many precursors, including ideas and systems sketched by Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. And Berners-lee began to play with hypertext programs in 1980, nearly 10 years before he and Robert Cailliau developed a proposal for an informationmanagement system.
Myths about the internet’s militaristic origins and Al Gore’s role have proved difficult to kill, despite some clear documentation of the facts by networking pioneers.
Myth No 2 The web is an American innovation
Discussions about internet governance often focus on international pressure to diminish United States control.
The Defence Department spent hundreds of millions of dollars from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s developing the core technologies of the internet.
But the web’s origins are distinctly European, and even the American contributions were infused with international collaboration.
Berners-lee, an Englishman, created some of the web’s key technologies while working as a software consultant alongside Cailliau, a Belgian engineer, at a Swiss lab. The American protagonists of internet development at ARPA, Cerf and Kahn, worked closely with European researchers and built on the concepts of French computer scientist Louis Pouzin.
Myth No 3 Government power is obsolete on the internet
The web came of age in an era of globalisation, so people writing about it picked up some of the same dizzying enthusiasm about what the future might hold.
Over the past three decades, governments at all levels – local, state, national and international – have claimed and exercised jurisdiction over behaviour online.
Examples include filtering and censorship regimes such as China’s Great Firewall, court rulings that forced Yahoo to remove Nazi memorabilia from its online auction service in France and international treaties to protect intellectual property.
Myth No 4 The gatekeepers Gatekeepers are dead; everything is disrupted!
Another example of breathless futurism is Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book, The World is Flat. Friedman (and others) saw the web and the internet as a ‘‘sudden revolution in connectivity’’ that ‘‘constituted a major flattening force’’ and would provide equal opportunity for all competitors.
But in music, academic publishing and elsewhere, these shifts have not generated the predicted revolutions.
Major music labels eventually adjusted to web-based distribution and revenue models, as did the old giants of academic and popular publishing. Other ideas that promised to ‘‘disrupt’’ this or that have fallen flat, such as the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) craze that led some pundits to predict ‘‘the end of university as we know it’’.
The best example, of course, was the dot-com crash. Entrepreneurs and starry-eyed investors had fuelled the bubble, eager to believe that the web’s rise changed all the rules.
But by 2000, everyone had learned the harsh reality: Sound business practices were not fundamentally disrupted by the ‘‘get big fast’’ ethos of web entrepreneurship. Despite predictions that the web portends a new economic era of commonsbased peer production, oldfashioned industrial capitalism has proved quite resilient.
Even companies that lead the ‘‘sharing economy’’, such as Uber and Airbnb, have massive capital expenditures and valuations that rival those of industrial giants such as Ford and General Motors.
Myth No 5 A massive cyberattack is coming
One constant in the web’s history has been the expectation that a major event will come along and change everything.
Political figures often issue warnings about a ‘‘digital Pearl Harbor’’ or a ‘‘cyber Pearl Harbor’’.
Even though a large-scale attack hasn’t materialised, experts continue to use the threat of one to try to shake the web out of some bad habits and inferior technologies.
Neither the web nor the internet was designed with unshakeable commitments to security or privacy, and efforts to update them have, for the most part, failed.
There have been plenty of proposals with broad consensus among technical communities. These and other efforts have faltered, however, because of poor design and lethargic adoption rates, leaving web users vulnerable to governments, corporations and anonymous bad actors of all kinds.
In the meantime, most users have grown accustomed to intrusions from hackers and viruses; they assume that there is no way to guarantee privacy or security on the web.
But despite the massive vulnerabilities and the regular occurrence of significant data breaches, the long-predicted ‘‘digital Pearl Harbor’’ has not come to pass. – Washington Post