Web's founding father raises concerns on open standards, Facebook and net neutrality

To coincide with the upcoming twentieth birthday of the world wide web, Sir Tim Burners Lee, the web’s founding father has voiced his concerns about the web’s current state – in a very timely article titled Long Live The Web in December’s Scientific American magazine.

The key concern raised by one of the greatest innovators of our time is the fast ending democracy and universality of web.

“Technical standards that are open and royalty-free allow people to create applications without anyone ’ s permission or having to pay. Patents, and Web services that do not use the common URIs for addresses, limit innovation. Threats to the Internet, such as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on Internet traffic, compromise basic human network rights. Web applications, linked data and other future Web technologies will flourish only if we protect the medium’ s basic principles.” says, the renowned computer scientist.

The knighted MIT professor goes on to state that ” Large social- networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web.” , pointing his finger towards the likes of Facebook. Facebook had only very recently had its access to Google Contacts API banned, due to Facebook’s unwillingless to open its contact data for sharing. And, Facebook doesn’t even let its own users export their contact details once they’re uploaded to the world’s largest social network.

“Governments — totalitarian and democratic alike — are monitoring people’ s online habits, endangering important human rights.” says Tim, pointing to the increasingly endangered net neutrality. Not just have most governments started to consider it a right to scoop into what people do online ( India, Saudi Arabia and UAE had only recently threatened RIM to open its Blackberry email database or face banning of the service. )
The highly reputed professor also points his finger at closed systems such as Apple’s iTunes, which run on proprietary standards while using the open web’s systems. He also mentions the rise of smartphone apps like the ones on iPhone as a threat to the web’s universality as the apps run on a very closed system not adhering to open standadrs, as opposed to Symbian’s Web Runtime and Qt framework.

A highly recommended reading of one of the most vocal articles ever from the web’s most important person ever.