I Want My Web Back

Imagine coming home one day to find your TV gone. Walking outside, you find a very large man holding your TV and refusing to give it back. Obviously he's huge, you're not going to start any trouble, so you ring the police. A single officer arrives and asks the man if he stole your TV. The man passes a £50 note to the officer and says "it's my TV". The officer winks and leaves.

The next day you return home to find your car gone. You look down the road, and there is the car, with the same man sitting in it, and your TV in the back seat.

The next day, the fridge is gone, along with everything in it. The day after that, your bed has gone too.

Eventually, the man knocks on your door and offers to rent you the TV that you own, for the reasonable sum of £5 an hour. You refuse this cheek, but then get a call from your elderly mum who needs you to go round and help her with something. You ask the man if you can have your car back, he tells you it'll be £20 a day for your own car. Seeing no other way, you hand over the £20. Slowly, as time goes on, you begin to just accept that you're going to have to pay a stranger repeatedly to access your own stuff from now on.

It sounds ludicrous -- and it is -- but this exactly what happened to the web. The web was invented in the 1990s. For the first 10 years or so there was no Google, no Facebook and Apple were with the good guys. I'm a co-owner of the web, as are you, the person reading this web site, and we have been since its invention. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor the web, declared "this is for everyone". He wanted the web to be free for all to use. But over time, it's been slowly taken from us. It's hard to use the web now without Google or Facebook tracking you, it's impossible to avoid Amazon and things that were free and easy to do are now "ad supported", or behind some kind of digital rights management. The vision of the open web in which everything speaks the same language and is inter-connected with everything else has been destroyed, and in its place we have a bunch of walled gardens and data silos that hold all the power. Most people don't even realise this, because only a small percentage of today's web users have been here since the beginning, and this is all they've ever known.

Sure, you could start your own service, but nobody will look at it because they're on Facebook, and if it doesn't follow Google's rules, nobody will ever find it. Starting a new service (for profit or otherwise) on the web these days is like joining a game of Monopoly half-way through when all the properties have been bought. Good luck with that.

If there is hope, as Orwell said, it lies in the proles. We can take the web back... but we won't. Most people rather like the convenience of having everything done for them, and have gotten so used to all the spam that they don't even notice it's there any more. Also, who wants to run their own server when Amazon will do it for you? Oh, and don't forget, Google won't talk to your server because it's not on their 'approved' list. So, as most of the internet is using Google, you're basically an outsider now. So, here we are, stuck in the situation of having something that's rightfully ours taken away and temporary access to it sold back to us under the illusion of it being a service, like some kind of extreme capitalist gaslighting.

I want my web back.