After reviewing this article published in the year 2010, written by Tim Berners-Lee, many critical and conflicting thoughts came into my mind.
Although I completely agree with the author that the web was created together with the Internet to share information with all people around the world as long as they can have access to the Internet. This is the initial aim of creating the web, which is fantastic.
Nevertheless, I doubt the outcomes of creating such a web. I believe that sharing information is beneficial to many aspects, especially for scientists to fasten their pace of doing researches. However, I do think that sharing information is causing a lot of problems. First of all, a huge amount of information makes it harder for people to find the truth. Secondly, the easiness of publishing information and the low cost of sharing wrong information make more people share everything they want in a second without thinking over the problem critically and even proving their own statement. Last but not least, the web that we thought is liberal for everyone to share information and where we can access all kinds of information is actually being controlled by “authorities”, not politically but technically, who can control the web operation, thus making the information we can have access to actually quite limited.
Furthermore, the call that the author mentioned in this article is that all of us who are using the web should defend it, just like how we are defending democracy. However, I do think that it is too difficult to reach. In my opinion, maybe one much more possible way is to issue some regulations to restrict the users’ behaviors as a complementation to the current web mode, even at the cost of sacrificing some liberty.