An uncelebrated birthday

Dragon Mood? -- snorting out celebratory puffs of fire

Last week, a birthday slipped by, quietly, uncelebrated. It is the 15th anniversary

"...of Tim Bernier-Lee's idea that there could be a worldwide web, linked not by spider silk but by hypertext links and transfer protocols and uniform resource locators."

The author of this article, James Boyle, goes on to say that the web is more amazing than we may realize. Why? Look at what the internet now contains: Google and Wikipedia and newspapers from around the globe; national maps, Project Gutenberg and blogs galore.

The worldwide web was created through the "conjunction of unlikely technologies." The web is reached by (deep breath for geek-speak)

"... 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."

And ...

"The web developed because we went in the opposite direction – towards openness and lack of centralised control."

A third amazing thing about the worldwide web is that, were it to be created today, it would likely be crippled by special interests, if not downright illegal. According to this columnist, the web became too popular too quickly to control. The lawyers and the politicians and the copyright holders were not there at the time of its conception. If they had been,

It would have looked more like pay-television, or Minitel, the French computer network.
... Allow anyone to connect to the network? Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy and pornography. [Yeah for pirates!]

So, let's hear it for openness and lack of centralized control! And let's all celebrate the amazing thing -- imagine, in our lifetimes -- that is the worldwide web!