30 years ago, the WWW went public and conquered the world – DW – 5/1/2023

a 1989 were revolutions. One of them occurred to the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee: a physicist at the research center of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), in Geneva, the most famous in the world, was disturbed by the notorious information chaos. Among the various institutes, working groups and numerous projects.

As a solution, he came up with the idea of ​​a digital data network through which scientists could exchange information. The scientist, then 34, briefly sketched out the idea. His boss commented on the note, “Vague yet exciting.” Apparently very vague, because nothing happened in the beginning.

But Berners-Lee continued to think, and the individual components of the World Wide Web were formed: the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for web addresses, and the HTML language for describing pages, that is, their programming. The HTTP technical protocol for links was working, and a recipe for the browser was finally found.

On April 30, 1993, the world’s public finally saw the result: CERN researchers launched the World Wide Web. The Internet’s triumphal march began, and not much has changed technologically to this day.

Goodbye to paper encyclopedias

Parents today have to explain to their 13-year-old daughter that at that age they knew nothing about the Internet or smartphones. Instead of shopping mall tours, today people shop online.

Big encyclopedias are forgotten on the shelves like mere dust collectors. While Wikipedia is the go-to for anyone looking for candid information, whether on the Revolution of 1789 or the invention of the Internet itself. Those who need an apartment no longer browse classified ads in newspapers, as they found plenty of ads on real estate portals.

Sometimes confusion, or at least information overload, is the downside of this digital network. In principle, everyone can advertise and publish their views, ideas, products, goods and visions on the network – this is the origin and idea of ​​\u200b\u200bits functionality. Donald Trump is a good example: among other things, the reach of his Twitter account has given him a loyal following, despite — or precisely because of — a lot of misinformation.

Search engines like Google or DuckDuckGo help sort the wheat from the chaff in the seemingly endless field of information. However, at least behind the big digital companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, there are global corporations primarily pursuing their own for-profit interests.

Making Profits by Structuring the Internet: An Odd Thought for Tim Berners-Lee. He could have patented his World Wide Web technology, but chose not to do so on purpose. The search for profit was at odds with his ideal of the free exchange of information.

Artificial intelligence is the next level

Either way, the next level on the internet is just emerging: artificial intelligence (AI). Just a few months ago, it was a program chat It sparked widespread debate: After 30 years of the Internet, the big question is whether this “intelligent virtual assistant” represents the future of the cybernetic.

“As an AI-based language model, I cannot say for sure that ChatGPT is the future of the Internet. The future of the Internet depends on many factors and is constantly changing. However, there are some features of ChatGPT and AI model counterparts that have the potential to influence and transform the Internet,” the program said. About himself when asked by DW.

But it’s important to note that AI models also come with ethical challenges, such as privacy, transparency, and accountability. And at this point the potential new level of the Internet Leaves much to be desired. Because ChatGPT can generate scripts that appear coherent in terms of content, but whose sources remain obscure.

Information transparency model

It is different from what Tim Berners-Lee did 30 years ago: his first site, which had a somewhat technical and complex address – http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html – contains, even today, basic information About the World Wide Web.

An explanatory text says: “WorldWideWeb (W3) is a comprehensive hypermedia information retrieval initiative aimed at providing global access to a vast world of documents.”

Hypermedia is a term related to hypertext, which denotes texts that contain links, that is, links with other texts. This is how this data network is formed without which today’s world cannot function.

If you have any doubts, you can go back in time. On the world’s first publicly accessible website, there is still a link for project participants. There lies Tim Berners-Lee. The 34-year-old researcher had Extension 3755 at Cern, e-mail: [email protected].

Since then, he has been knighted in the United Kingdom, and given the title “Sir”. And it probably wouldn’t be in the title, since he’s been a professor at MIT and a professor at Oxford since 2016.

To this day Sir Tim Berners-Lee runs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) he founded, a committee to standardize technologies on the WWW, where you can search the Internet, with just a few clicks on your smartphone.