Berners-Lee: 3 Reasons Why The Internet Is In Serious Trouble

Most people love the Internet. It's a tool that has made life easier and more efficient in many ways. Even with all of those advances, the founder of the Internet listed three reasons why our favorite digital tool is in serious trouble:

1. Consumers have lost control of their personal information
2. It's too easy for anyone to publish misinformation online
3. Political advertising online lacks transparency

Tim Berners-Lee explained the first reason:

"The current business model for many websites offers free content in exchange for personal data. Many of us agree to this – albeit often by accepting long and confusing terms and conditions documents – but fundamentally we do not mind some information being collected in exchange for free services. But, we’re missing a trick. As our data is then held in proprietary silos, out of sight to us, we lose out on the benefits we could realise if we had direct control over this data and chose when and with whom to share it. What’s more, we often do not have any way of feeding back to companies what data we’d rather not share..."

Given appointees in the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by President Trump, it will likely get worse as the FCC seeks to revoke online privacy and net neutrality protections for consumers in the United States. Berners-Lee explained the second reason:

"Today, most people find news and information on the web through just a handful of social media sites and search engines. These sites make more money when we click on the links they show us. And they choose what to show us based on algorithms that learn from our personal data that they are constantly harvesting. The net result is that these sites show us content they think we’ll click on – meaning that misinformation, or fake news, which is surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases, can spread like wildfire..."

Fake news has become so widespread that many public libraries, schools, and colleges teach students how to recognize fake news sites and content. The problem is more widespread and isn't limited to social networking sites like Facebook promoting certain news. It also includes search engines. Readers of this blog are familiar with the DuckDuckGo search engine for both online privacy online and to escape the filter bubble. According to its public traffic page, DuckDuckGo gets about 14 million searches daily.

Most other search engines collect information about their users and that to serve search results items related to what they've searched upon previously. That's called the "filter bubble." It's great for search engines' profitability as it encourages repeat usage, but is terrible for consumers wanting unbiased and unfiltered search results.

Berners-Lee warned that online political advertising:

"... has rapidly become a sophisticated industry. The fact that most people get their information from just a few platforms and the increasing sophistication of algorithms drawing upon rich pools of personal data mean that political campaigns are now building individual adverts targeted directly at users. One source suggests that in the 2016 U.S. election, as many as 50,000 variations of adverts were being served every single day on Facebook, a near-impossible situation to monitor. And there are suggestions that some political adverts – in the US and around the world – are being used in unethical ways – to point voters to fake news sites, for instance, or to keep others away from the polls. Targeted advertising allows a campaign to say completely different, possibly conflicting things to different groups. Is that democratic?"

What do you think of the assessment by Berners-Lee? Of his solutions? Any other issues?