Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wde web stated that the internet has failed to deliver to society a better and more constructive world than many of us expected.
"The internet has become much more centralized than it was ten years ago."
According to Tim, the internet has become very controlled. When access to it was still mainly through desktop or laptop computers, users could find incredible new services and try many things on their own. Nowadays, the main way to go online is through smartphones and tablets that confine users to carefully circumscribed spaces, which are hardly more exciting than television channels.
In both the West and China, the activities that this global network enables are dominated by some giants, Facebook à Tencent. Mobile operating system manufacturers can acquire data from smartphone owners through their app stores.
Another point of control that Tim points out is cloud computing, which, by its nature, puts outsiders in charge of applications and their associated data. Meanwhile, governments, which for a long time did not participate in the Internet, have established power over much of the network, often using large Internet companies as willpower.
When the first message was sent over the Internet almost half a century ago, 29 in October 1969, the system was "biased in favor of decentralization of power and freedom to act," according to Yochai Benkler, of Harvard University.
Do you share the same opinion as the inventor Tim? Has the internet really failed?
