Father of Web says tech giants may have to be split up
Father of Web says tech giants may have to be split up
Guy Faulconbridge, Paul Sandle OCTOBER 31, 2018 / 10:16
PM
LONDON (Reuters) - Silicon Valley technology giants such
as Facebook and Google have grown so dominant they may need to be broken up,
unless challengers or changes in taste reduce their clout, the inventor of the
World Wide Web told Reuters.
The digital revolution has spawned a handful of
U.S.-based technology companies since the 1990s that now have a combined
financial and cultural power greater than most sovereign states.
Tim Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist who
invented the Web in 1989, said he was disappointed with the current state of
the internet, following scandals over the abuse of personal data and the use of
social media to spread hate.
“What naturally happens is you end up with one company
dominating the field so through history there is no alternative to really
coming in and breaking things up,” Berners-Lee, 63, said in an interview.
“There is a danger of concentration.”
But he urged caution too, saying the speed of innovation
in both technology and tastes could ultimately cut some of the biggest
technology companies down to size.
“Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are
not just disrupted by a small player beating them out of the market, but by the
market shifting, by the interest going somewhere else,” Berners-Lee said.
Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook have a
combined market capitalization of $3.7 trillion, equal to Germany’s gross
domestic product last year.
LOVE AND HATE
Berners-Lee came up with the idea for what he initially
called “Mesh” while working at Europe’s physics research center CERN, calling
it the World Wide Web in 1990.
When asked who had the biggest intellectual influence on
him, he said: “Mum and Dad.”
“They were building computers, so I grew up living in a
world where everything was mathematics and the excitement of being able to
program something was very fresh,” he said.
There was, he said, no ‘Eureka’ moment.
Instead, it was hard work, the experience of working in
computer science and an attempt to overcome the frustrations of trying to share
information with colleagues and students.
“Eureka moments are complete nonsense. I don’t even
believe the one about Archimedes. He had been thinking about it for a long
time,” he said.
Now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and the University of Oxford, Berners-Lee expressed dismay at the
way consultancy Cambridge Analytica obtained the personal data of 87 million
Facebook users from a researcher.
That scandal, he said, was a tipping point for many.
“I am disappointed with the current state of the Web,” he
said. “We have lost the feeling of individual empowerment and to a certain
extent also I think the optimism has cracked.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized after the
Cambridge Analytica scandal and pledged to do more to protect users’ data.
Facebook user growth slows but earnings beat
But social media, Berners-Lee said, was still being used
to propagate hate.
“If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay
but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more
strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a
medium has been built?’”
Editing by Mark Potter
Comments
Post a Comment