Thirty years ago today Tim Berners-Lee put forward an idea he called 'Mesh' which evolved into the World Wide Web which revolutionised the World but reminiscing on his invention three decades on, he isn't too pleased with what his baby has become.
His concerns are over how the Web has created: 'opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit' and cited the Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook as how people's faith has been shaken in the Web.
In retrospect, allowing the public to post their unfiltered thoughts online was always going to be a problem and is now an entrenched problem for the Web although Berners-Lee appears to consider it a fixable problem and suggests a 'Contract for the Web' with people signing up creating a set of rules for the internet to make it a lot less inhospitable and crime ridden wild west where anything goes.
That seems to fall heavily upon the big firms regulating their users and removing any content deemed unsuitable but that opens up the problem of how and who decides what is unacceptable.
The reality is that you can tinker with the edges but the Web is probably an unfixable problem and in another 30 years time the same problems of scammers, haters and criminals taking advantage of the freedom and anonymity that the Web provides will still be with us.
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