Is the internet breaking down? Occasionally the theme comes up again. This time the opportunity is a long article by Jonathan Zittrain, American Professor of Digital Law and International Law at the Law School of Harvard and author of the book The Future of the Internet, its The Atlantic.
When we started writing on the web more than a quarter of a century ago, we were certain that nothing would be lost. We trusted. But much has become unreachable, ended up on the dead end of broken links. Sometimes due to the neglect and sloppiness of publishers who do not value historical archives and thus – more or less consciously – are boycotting the dream of global digital storage of knowledge. But apparently we have to make peace with the fact that the Web wasn’t designed, as we liked to think, to archive everything forever.
We have had the opportunity to talk about it with Ray Ozzie, an American software entrepreneur who is simultaneously a pioneer and a visionary. Ten years ago he already imagined a world in which computers would be prehistoric. Born in 1955, in 1989 development the Lotus Notes e-mail client, which then transformed in Ibm Notes. In 2005 he took over from Bill Gates come Chief Software Architect of Microsoft When Gates he decided to retire to devote himself to his foundation. He drove Microsoft to the cloud computing with Azure, Windows Live e Office Web Apps. In 2010 he left to direct Hewlett Packard and today it is advisor of At & t, the American telephony giant, e chief executive officer of the startup Blues Wireless. He introduced us the mutual friend Dave Winer, software developer and pioneer tech entrepreneur feed Rss, blogs and podcasts.
“Hard to say what is more worrying for the preservation of humanity’s knowledge today: the fact that online sources disappear without warning or can be changed. without anyone noticing? “, chiede Zittrain su The Atlantic. Zittrain writes about broken links and the fragility of knowledge in the digital age: “Libraries in these scenarios are no longer custodians of anything tangible or intangible for centuries, but rather fundraisers to pay for fleeting access to knowledge elsewhere”. This problem had already been well described in 2013 by Adam Tinworth. The irony is that it contains a link to blog posts by Winer which is broken, ma ne we found the substance who: “I think a great university like Harvard, which places a high value on learning, history, tradition and has played an important role in promoting the development of social media, because it was Mark’s home Zuckerberg at the dawn of Facebook and at the same time for the nascent blogging community e podcasting, should take an active interest not only in preserving archives, but also in helping to set standards for how the web can continue in the long run, even in the age of silos and corporate ownership. We, collectively, have a responsibility to do it right. ”
What do you think, Ray Ozzie?
“The problem with broken links is pretty deep and nuanced. People thoughtful and brilliant like Dave Winer e Brewster Kahle (that founded in 1996 theInternet Archive with the stated aim of archiving all the Web, ed) continue to evangelize and work in their own way, but for the moment there don’t seem to be perfect solutions. To explain the challenge to normal people he goes said that the original design of the Web was based on the concept of resources (such as documents and photos and music), each of which has an address (url) which could be inserted into documents, printed on billboards, inserted into legal contracts and whatever else. We tend to think of these addresses, the documents and images they contain, like establish and timeless: why shouldn’t they be? But you need to know that: it costs someone real money to keep the computers that contain those documents and images, and sometimes they die, fail or simply lose the motivation to keep paying. Sometimes what’s right to publish today is considered unacceptable to publish tomorrow. It can be considered offensive, illegal or harmful to the privacy or rights of others. Sometimes the addresses change simply due to geopolitical problems: the links in Porto Rico ending in.pr will be changed in .pr.us if Porto Rico becomes an American state? Where is it .tw? These problems are not theoretical, we are inundated with pages with Error 404 like this. Sometimes addresses simply change due to corporate mergers, divisions and dissolution. This can be quite complex because a competitor can acquire an expired domain and turn it into something that posts new documents to those same addresses.
In real life, people have both names and addresses, names aren’t unique, and our addresses change over time. In the United States, when we want a document to stand the test of time:
1) we sign contracts including our name and address and date, uniquely indicating how we were called and where we lived at a point in time.
2) We store them in a place and with a stable institution over time that does not require ongoing maintenance costs – the most common is a church or a Register of Acts “.
but yet the architects of the Internet were well-meaning. What did they do wrong?
“They failed to understand and embrace the concept of resource names, they thought they understood addresses and names with Ip vs Dns, but all they did was create a paid for-profit text address lookup service for numeric addresses. They failed to understand and embrace the concept of a stable and free Register of Proceedings in which one could perpetually (without running costs) locate a document or photo by book number, page number, line number in that register, and where the truths in a moment of time by law cannot be eliminated by political changes, deaths or changes in the corporate structure “.
She tried too: how did it go?
When I was in Microsoft I was blessed with a budget that allowed me to do some experiments that I believed in. Some of those experiments have survived (notably Azure, the platform cloud public), while many others were learning experiences. In one experiment I challenged the team to see if they could create a perpetual ledger where a customer could pay upfront (99 once, forever) and receive a set of storage, a guaranteed amount of compute, a stable name, and address, and a series of guarantees that would not be affected by inevitable events such as death and dissolution. We have overcome many technical and financial obstacles. However, I closed the project when I was unable to overcome as many legal hurdles, the worst related to managing the copyright owner and government takedown requests. Have there always been problems with what happens if someone posts child pornography? Royalty-covered music? Confidential information? Racist content? “.
Are there any solutions?
“I’m not a great person from cryptovalutebut I grew up believing that the most solution viable on the horizon is the creation of a blockchain universal that represents the Register of Facts. Today there is content on the blockchain of Bitcoin that will never fade. Due to the emergence of Nft (Non-fungible token, a special type of cryptographic token that represents something unique, ed), there’s a growing interest intimeless decentralized storage. Until one of these systems reaches critical mass, however, we really need to get the word out that the Web as we know it is purely ephemeral. There is nothing bad or evil or even sad about this; it’s just the way it is. We can do better if we try. “
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