I’ve been posting a lot about technical writing recently, but I also like thinking about the Internet. This is a really nice interview with Tim Berners Lee on Decoder (the Verge’s podcast).
First up, on podcasts…
They always try to persuade you to use the app, because then they have more control, they can track you better. But also with podcasts particularly, I use a podcast program, a generic podcast app, that I can listen to any podcast with.
For me, that’s the web as it should be. You could send me a link to a podcast, or I can search for it and I can keep track of all the hundreds of podcasts I’m interested in. It is a bit like keeping bookmarks on the first original browser. So, to a certain extent, podcasts work well. But if people end up on the app and then are tracked and not using the podcast app, then not so. All that tension is huge right now for the web, yes.
Which echoes a lot of what I love about podcasts and blogging.
But really, there’s very insightful discussion about where the web is at now, and where things are going in the age of LLMs:
At the beginning of the web, you made a lot of people with a lot of power agree to participate in some standards. You made them agree to participate in browser standards. There was a ferocious competition among browsers at that time.
It seems like we’re about to enter a period of ferocious competition in browsers again, which I want to come to. But at that time, at the beginning of the web, there was a lot of competition in browsers. Microsoft was brought to heel in an antitrust case, because there was such ferocious competition among browsers.
How did you go about convincing all of those companies and all of those people to adopt your standards and say, “We actually have to be good stewards of the collective”? Because that doesn’t seem like a thing that could happen today, but you were able to do it at the outset of the web. How’d you do it?
By persuading them that one web was going to be really good. If you have just one web, it would take off exponentially. If we had many little webs, they would each die. People realized that and they managed to persuade the governance within their platforms, their managers and their boards, to make this one web. They knew that if they fought over incompatible versions of HTML, then the web would not take off, like it would if they made one web. If they made one web, then one web would take off and become huge, and then their part of that web would be itself huge.
Could you make that argument today? And what technology would you make it about?
A lot of people would wonder whether you can make it with AI. There is no World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for AI, which is bringing everybody together in one room. Some people have suggested there should be something like a CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) for AI, some big high-energy physics lab in some big international lab that develops AI. That way you can really optimize both the development of AI, but also prevent the thing running away, so you can build containers around it, for example.
Also worth thinking about is how AI is changing how we consume and access the Internet. Major companies race to implement new browsers, whether governance and new standards will emerge, and companies like Cloudflare work to monetize AI access to your website’s content. It’s a good discussion, and I will definitely be looking into picking up the memoir.
As much as I’m leery about the prospects of Perplexity’s Comet browser, using an RSS reader is kind of like using a headless browser, and AI is becoming another form of interface for content on the web. The financial incentives shaping popular sources of content are definitely going to shape how we communicate both personally and professionally. If you produce web content (docs, marketing, etc.), it’s worth being aware of these structures and how they’re changing.