back to article Berners-Lee takes flak for 'hippie manifesto' that only Google and Facebook could love

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is doing the dirty work of giant internet companies, according to critics who want to see governments lay down effective regulation – and not what they regard as a wishy-washy "Magna Carta". It isn't the first time Berners-Lee has endorsed a "Magna Carta" – he did one in 2014 and another again this week ( …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Given how it's worked out for the EU

    ...I'd imagine Google and Facebook will be lobbying pretty hard for this in the US to help increase their market share.

    It will be interesting to see who lobbies against it if it does receive serious political consideration. I suspect there may be some surprises.

  2. Dan 55 Silver badge

    "So you may find our encounter from 2007 illuminating."

    SEO gaming, what an innocent time. A decade and a bit later, we find two videos circulating about a Q&A session in a recent White House press conference. One has red circles and ding-dong noises all over it and the other has been slowed down and sped up at various points, and both claim to be a true representation of what happened, but of course neither is. Both videos are carried by their standard-bearers and their armies mass around them before charging into battle on the fields of Facebook and Twitter.

    I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant to be like this. There's a debate if it should be fixed with a code of conduct or a law, but implementation details aside, how could this example even be fixed in the first place?

    1. #define INFINITY -1

      Re: "So you may find our encounter from 2007 illuminating."

      Divide and conquer.

  3. Dave_uk

    "...the Greatest Living Briton..."

    "...the Greatest Living Briton..."

    thanks for the heads-up reminder.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Give that man a knighthood

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Knighthood is soooooo special today...

      ... that I'd like to know where I apply for knighthood now days? I just got my online certifications for performing marriages and changing Freon coolant, I just want to round things out a bit.

      1. onefang

        Re: Knighthood is soooooo special today...

        A couple of Prime Ministers ago, you could have just asked Tony Abbott nicely.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > "Give that man a knighthood"

      One for each shoulder?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Airline industry

    is one of the most regulated sectors and it doesn't seem to be harmed at all.

    1. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Airline industry

      Yes, and the customer experience is so lovely . . .

    2. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: Airline industry

      > is one of the most regulated sectors

      No! It was almost completely deregulated in 1978 in the US, which is when it went to shit

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Deregulation_Act

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_deregulation

      And tons and tons of Google results...

  6. bombastic bob Silver badge
    Mushroom

    "Google is also the biggest revenue stream for Mozilla"

    THAT explains a lot... Australis and the shift to 57 [and apparent abandonment of 52-ESR]

    and weak privacy protections, as well. What's next, HTML 5 audio/video you CANNOT turn off? Scripty video ads jammed into our faces and tracking our every move online in the background, requiriing "click through" and a REBOOT to get past them?

    [I should stop giving them ideas]

  7. SVV

    Magna Carts for the web

    Magna Carts is almost entirely devoted to giving power to rich barons, taking it away from the state (the king) and limiting tax raising powers. No wonder Facebook and Google are so keen to have one for themselves. The ordinary serfs were granted almost nothing as the barons were now in a position of even greater power over them.

    The fetishisation of this much renewed and cancelled charter masks a much more serious truth : that universal suffrage in democracies is generally younger than some people still alive in many of them : USA and UK included. Rather than great charters, only good legislation and regulation will tame these beasts. And I have little confidence in any current politicians to be able to devise and implement this.

  8. Graham Cobb Silver badge

    Quoting a mouthpiece for the RIAA???

    I strongly agree that Internet giants with significant market power need serious regulation to prevent their anti-social actions, particularly around privacy.

    However, first there needs to be strong regulation of media companies who not only have market power but create cartels like RIAA and MPAA. Their anti-social abuse of copyright, a measure designed to augment the public domain by reserving some rights for a very limited time to allow reasonable profits to be made, needs to be strongly curbed first.

    Modern technology has so dramatically reduced the costs of distributing content that the limited profit intended to be delivered to the content producer could now be achieved in much less than 20 years -- copyright terms should have gone down over the last 100 years, not up!

    Yes, regulate large internet players. But clean up the copyright cartels and kill off the greed of the content players first.

    1. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: Quoting a mouthpiece for the RIAA???

      Came in to say this. Also, note the quote from one of Cloudflare's competitors. It's almost as if Orlowski is actively working to undermine his own credibility by citing parties with an obvious conflict of interest.

  9. bigtreeman

    Follow the money

    Follow the money.

    "Don't be Evil" was a fizzer

    "Do the right thing" (to increase Alphabets profits)

    and Facebook's recent disapproval rating

    Corporate world control and domination IS the current picture.

    Sir Tim designed the original Internet for server / client corporate control.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    why is Berners-Lee's opinion on this any more qualified than any other person in the tech industry?

    there's this strange veneration he receives as the 'father of the internet' as if he's engineered and directed this invention all the way along. feck that. i respect the guy for being one of the first and all, but all that hard work of working out the details and getting x towork with y was done by other people. lots and lots of other people. if anything the complexity and flaws in the network are evidence that little thought was put into where the technology could go.

    like any 'father', the only real qualifier is the one who donated the sperm. the real hard work is parenting - and the credits for that go towards all those hardworking scientists and engineers who work with this shit day in and day out.

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