Friday, October 09, 2009

SUZANNE PRATT: The worldwide web turned 20 years old in March and though it may seem everyone around you is online, just 20 percent of the world has access to the Internet. Getting the rest there is the goal of Tim Berners- Lee, the creator of the worldwide web. Darren Gersh recently talked with Berners-Lee and began by asking what happens when the other 80 percent of the world logs on.

TIM BERNERS-LEE, DIR., WORLD WIDE WEB CONSORTIUM: That's a great question and in fact, we started the worldwide web foundation in order to answer those questions because it is not obvious. For example, web technology has been developed very much by the developed countries for the developed countries. Maybe if we tweaked it a little bit, it would actually be easier for people in the developing countries to use or maybe that there are applications which you'd like to have that have to be invented by very creative people who are actually in Africa themselves and will be able to develop their own ones so long as they give us the space, someone to host it.

DARREN GERSH, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: In Washington and the United States, we just assumed that U.S. companies like Intel, Google, Microsoft, will dominate the Internet. What happens when the rest of the world comes into the Internet?

BERNERS-LEE: You can never tell who is going to dominate in a few years' time. I remember when people were worried about Netscape dominating the Internet and then they discovered it was Microsoft and now they worry about Google. But certainly there will be a huge shift for example when a very large amount of it on there is in Chinese. You get maybe some countries will end up using a lot of English, but maybe other countries won't. So then the question will be, can we get automatic translation which will work or will we end up an English-speaking world through which new ideas, new fears, new gossip will spread every few minutes across the Internet. But then we'll have a Chinese-speaking world which doesn't really connect so quickly and for which different ideas spread. How -- will they get polarization of cultures or maybe worse, a monoculture?

GERSH: We're having a debate in the United States over how you pay for the Internet, whether it should be net neutral and heavy users don't pay more than light users. You have some strong views on that.

BERNERS-LEE: Well first of all, let me correct you. You said I wanted to be net neutral in that everybody would pay the same amount no matter how much bandwidth. That's nonsense If I pay for a certain bandwidth and I've got a web browser and you paid to connect, then we can talk. Nobody is going to be trying to stop me getting to your web site because they want -- they don't need to get PBS because they want to sell me their own movies. So neutrality is about having an open market.

GERSH: I guess the argument come back that if you're a company providing access to the Internet and someone wants to pay more so that their stuff can come out faster, they can reach people more easily and be preferred over packets of information that come out more slowly, what's wrong with that? Isn't that going to help people who provide those services build out new services and better services? That's their argument, isn't it?

BERNERS-LEE: Well, of course, if you want to really fund the people who are providing the services, then what you do is you give them complete control over what somebody sees. So, yes, if you give somebody the ability to really abuse the medium and take advantage of the consumer, then they've got a fantastic business model. However, you've destroyed the way the Internet works.

GERSH: So it's been 20 years since you invented the worldwide web. What is the biggest challenge for the Internet in the next 20 years?

BERNERS-LEE: Well, I think looking forward the most difficult thing that we're not doing is we're not actually studying the web. The web's huge. It's a huge system. There are actually more web pages out there than there are neurons in a person's brain. So there are a lot of nerve cells (ph) in a person's brain, but we are starting to figure out how the brain works but we really don't study how the web works. It's humanity connected, all these people making links, following links, exchanging ideas, trying to put together new forms of democracy, new social networking systems. We don't really understand what is going to work and what isn't. We don't really know what are the dangers. Could it become unstable? What are the really huge opportunities? So studying the web is really important. I think the danger is we don't study it and then suddenly, something happens like the financial downturn, like spam coming along, like one of these things where whoa! Oops, didn't plan for that. Now what went wrong? So we shouldn't be looking back and thinking what went wrong? We should be looking forward and thinking, OK, what are the things that could happen? What would be likely to happen? How can we tweak the web? After all the web, unlike the brain, is something that we designed. It's an engineering thing.

GERSH: Thanks for your time. It's been fascinating. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the worldwide web.

BERNERS-LEE: My pleasure.

PRATT: You can watch our entire interview with Tim Berners-Lee on the worldwide web that he created at NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT on pbs.org.

His group at MIT is amazing. They are among the smartest people I ever met.