The web will be 15 years old on Sunday. According to the Wikipedia, and surely on such a topic even Jim (see "comments" below) will recognise dear old Wikipedia as an authoritative (if anonymous) voice, Tim Berners-Lee created the very first page of the World Wide Web on 13th November 1990.
Of all institutions to celebrate this fact it seems nicely paradoxical to me that the Financial Times should be (a) the first I saw (thanks to Peter Suber at OAN) and (b) contain a celebration of the anarchic freedom of the web from commercial control!
James Boyle (Duke Law School) wrote the article: "Web's never-to-be-repeated revolution" which is full of goodies, like this:
Why is the web unlikely? Prepare for a moment of geek-speak. For most of us, the web is reached by general-purpose computers that use open protocols - standards and languages that are owned by no one - to communicate with a network (there is no central point from which all data comes) whose mechanisms for transferring data are also open.James rightly points out that we can see the importance of that if we imagine its opposite, a web designed by commercial or government interests:
Why might we not create the web today? The web became hugely popular too quickly to control. The lawyers and policymakers and copyright holders were not there at the time of its conception. What would they have said, had they been? What would a web designed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation or the Disney Corporation have looked like? It would have looked more like pay-television, or Minitel, the French computer network. Beforehand, the logic of control always makes sense. "Allow anyone to connect to the network? Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy and pornography."Happy birthday for Sunday, dear Web, and God bless you, warts and all!
And of course it is. But it is also much, much more. The lawyers have learnt their lesson now. The regulation of technological development proceeds apace. When the next disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web - is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident. That is not a happy thought.
¶ 7:53 AM
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How odd to think that in 15 years our communication has been completely transformed.
I remember the days of my brothers WS2000 1200 baud modem, the £250 telephone bills, the BBC microcomputer, mobile phones as big as your house.
Now we sit here communicating globally with our laptops connected wirelessly (well it would be wireless if my battery lasted more than 20 seconds, I have to be within a meter of a socket). Wonder what we will be doing in another 15 years time.
By 
Graham Doel, at
November 9, 2005 6:19 PM
If James Boyle is right, and I fear he may be, then what we'll get is both more and less of the same... Bigger, faster and more, as the hardware catches up; but less as the corporations and governments gradually, like glaciers, come to terms with the 'net.
The Internet as we know it is an unrepeatable wonder, because it escaped into the wild before the corporations etc. learned or recognised its power or worth...
But is James Boyle right? Or does the move to "being digital" make all the difference? Usually I'd argue it does. Indeed I do argue that in my latest article in the next edition of Colloquium (due out any day), but today I am tired and depressed, and James Boyle's scepticism and pessimism sounds too close to the mark ;)
But still I am at heart a technofreak, I marvel at where we were 10, 15, 20... years ago, and almost wish I had been born 20 years later...
By 
Tim, at
November 9, 2005 8:28 PM
