Berners-Lee Calls

Berners-Lee Calls

For Openness

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, made a ringing call for openness, decentralization, and user control on the mobile web in his speech to the Innovation Forum at the 3GSM World Congress.

Some of Berners-Lee’s comments seemed controversial to his audience of telco executive, as he called for a re-examination of some of the industry’s most traditional beliefs.

“The serendipitous re-use of information happens because when I buy an internet connection, I don’t specify the websites I am going to connect to,” he said. “If you buy an internet connection, and you run a web server, then I can connect to your site. I don’t find my ISP saying that it wants to be my supplier of music and so it will block access to any site I try to load music from.”

This is probably not what the numerous mobile operators who are keen on applying DRM-based restrictions to their mobile music players wanted to hear.

Berners-Lee characterized technologies as falling into two categories, “ceilings”, which restrict their possible uses, and “foundations”, which maximize the variety of possible uses and the spectrum of users who can adapt them to their own needs.

“Ceiling technologies are the end of the road of innovation. When you want to make a foundation technology, you need to look ahead. You need to put aside the short term return on investment questions and look at the long term,” he said. “A great example of this is the patent question. In 1989 my colleagues in the internet community would not have dreamed of patenting the ideas in the internet protocols.”