Five myths about the web
AS we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, it gets more and more difficult to imagine life without it – or without cat videos. And although our world certainly has been transformed by the web’s capabilities, its history includes some persistent myths and comically naive predictions.
Myth No 1: We know who invented the web and the internet, and when Ask Google who invented the web and the internet, and it will give you an answer. But the concept of “invention” does not map well to the actual histories of these technologies, which arose from collaborations among large numbers of people and whose development features very few moments that were obvious transformations.
The history of the web has one singular figure, Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to format textbased documents, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to send documents across the internet, and a software program to view or browse pages. But Berners-Lee did not sit down one day and create the internet. There were many precursors, including ideas and systems sketched by Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. And BernersLee began to play with hypertext programs in 1980, nearly 10 years before he and Robert Cailliau developed a proposal for an informationmanagement system.
Other milestones included the posting of the first website on December 20, 1990; when BernersLee announced the web project to a public mailing list on August 6, 1991; and the declaration on April 30, 1993, that the web’s underlying code would be publicly and freely available. Myths about the internet’s militaristic origins and Al Gore’s role have proved difficult to kill, despite some clear documentation of the facts by networking pioneers including Stephen Lukasik, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.
Myth No 2: The web is an American innovation Discussions about internet governance often focus on international pressure to diminish US control. The US Defense Department spent hundreds of millions of dollars from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s developing the core technologies of the internet. Through entities such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the Defense Communications Agency, defence investments played major roles in the creation of the digital infrastructure that we use to browse the web. Congress and the White House – yes, including congressman and later vice president Al Gore – passed legislation and set policies to support the development of the commercial internet and ecommerce. And of course many icons of the web’s history are American: Yahoo, AOL, Google and others.
But the web’s origins are distinctly European, and even the American contributions were infused with international collaboration. Berners-Lee, an Englishman, created some of the web’s key technologies while working as a software consultant alongside Cailliau, a Belgian engineer, at a Swiss lab. The American protagonists of internet development at ARPA, Cerf and Kahn, worked closely with European researchers and built on the concepts of French computer scientist Louis Pouzin. And when Gore promoted the “information superhighway”, he did so within the context of an explicitly globalist vision, such as in a famous 1994 speech at the International Telecommunications Union.
Myth No 3: Government power is obsolete on the internet The web came of age in an era of globalisation, so people writing about it picked up some of the same dizzying enthusiasm about what the future might hold. The best example is John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, which he wrote in Davos, Switzerland, in 1996. Barlow, a libertarian rancher from Wyoming and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, included some beautiful lines in his manifesto: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind … You have no sovereignty where we gather … Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no mat