Alan Yentob on the World wide web
I watched this evening’s Imagine, (Alan Yentob culture show) for two reasons. One, it had Tom Reynolds on it - all too briefly, in fact. He certainly got less screen time than a man with a mask on, and a guy who put a cravat on to blog.
And two, because it was about the internet: specifically, the world wide web. I find it amusing to watch programs like that as an exercise in culture-watching. You can see how familiar the general populace is with technology by seeing how it is portrayed. And I was happy to note that there were no real technical errors in what was presented. Five years ago that would not have been the case. What’s more worrying is that this show was more grounded and far realler than anything Horizon would put on at the moment.
But most of the touchstones of modern internet life were there - blogging, myspace, youtube and so on. He spoke to Tim Berners-Lee (go Tim go!) and the weegie who wrote the millionth Wikipedia article (about Jordanhil train station, would you believe).
The conversation with Tim was good. Yentob immediately comes out with the classic “do you see yourself as a techie or a creator” and gets a good dressing down from Berners-Lee for putting these in opposition. He was nicely effusive about the Joys of Programming (there was a glimmer of something in the presenter’s eyes at that point, but I couldn’t say what it was).
Strangely - or at least I thought so, maybe others won’t - Alan Yentob asked why he’d released his web “for free”. Why didn’t he charge? Why didn’t he keep it proprietary? Again, I was made very happy by the response he got, that releasing it for free or otherwise wasn’t even an issue considered. He talked about RFCs and stuff.
I think there must have been some fundamental misunderstanding to even suggest that question. The first was obviously the way science is done - especially the network engineering whose foundation Berners-Lee was working on. The history of the internet and every other successful protocol has been worked out through RFCs and peer review. Wikipedia suggests the first ever RFC in the current series was published in 1969. To whose advantage would it be to attempt to create a ‘private’ network whose details were unknown?
Secondly, and more importantly, it assumes there is a product to sell, and that others would buy it. Tim Berners-Lee invented two languages, HTML and HTTP. They are what comprise the web. How successful has someone selling a language ever been? (How many speakers of Loglan are there? Fewer than speak Klingon, I’ll bet.) It would be like trying to sell Morse code or semaphore. Also, you’d be fighting network economics - what use is buying a system with no users? Who would be the first person to buy a fax machine, because there’s no one in the world to fax. The web worked because it is free - it’s all very well saying that he should have been charging money for it, but if he had done I’m sure he wouldn’t have made any. There would have been no web, certainly not as we know it, and we’d all be poorer.