They kind of fix this in the lede, but dude did not invent the internet, he invented the World Wide Web. The internet is a superset of a whole bunch of things that includes the World Wide Web, but dude wasn’t out there inventing TCP/IP and routers and whatnot.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Nowhere does it say he calls himself the creator. I'd be looking at the media for labelling him that.
They're replying to the article title, which was incorrect but has now been fixed.
Nowhere did they say he called himself the creator, either. They only replied to the statement presented.
You're thinking of the ARPANET. When people think of the Internet. They think of the network that Gore pushed hard to open to the public. And the interface Lee designed. Gopher is having a small resurgence, and Gemini exists. But effectively what the average person sees as the Internet is their child philosophically.
I mean as a techy you aren't wrong. There's a lot of underlying things and technologies that sort of glosses over. But to the layperson at large we're just pedantically nitpicking.
Gopher is having a small resurgence, and Gemini exists.
You forgot email. That seems like a pretty important use of the Internet that isn't the web.
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People say wifi when they mean the Internet, somehow one cannot expect accuracy. Articles always get written by professional clueless people also.
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And the "World Wide Web" mostly means HTML - "hypertext" documents which can be published on the internet, and which are regular documents but with embedded links to other documents (hyperlinks), and a vision to ultimately create the "semantic web" - human-readable text which can also be processed by computers.
To be exact, Tim Berners Lee invented the original HTML specification, the HTTP communication protocol, and a proof-of-concept browser that implements both of them. These three things were required - on top of TCP, IP, Ethernets, that already existed - to build the Web.
The original hypertext proposal was even more complex than what we ended up getting, connecting ideas both ways.
You supported DRM dude. Self critique, renounce your mistakes, and if you really want to go after ICANN, give me a call.
*web inventor
I'd give anything for the internet to go back to how it was in the early/mid 90s.
Back before it was corporatized, monetized and before all the gardens started building their walls.
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The fact that no one is challenging "internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee" is making me want to blow up my desktop
Sadly most people don't understand the difference between www and the internet.
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"The internet should be for everyone, except the people I don't like." - average modern internet user
Glad he's able to call out the domain name system for the crock of shit that it is.
It's always the fucking DNS. .__.
The internet isn't broken... Humanity is.
So I was tuning into ~~this guy~~ another person testifying to Congress the other day by the name of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. Supposed neuroscientist, etc. Testifying to the effects of digital learning, pads, etc.
Something just rubbed me the wrong way about him. Especially when you see the likes of Ted Cruz talking him up.
Dude is heavily pushed by Moms for Liberty and "The Free Press" which we all know is a right-wing propaganda wing that gave us none other than Bari Weiss.
I think the play here may be that they want to isolate children from the broader world and being exposed to other viewpoints. My gut instinct is that they're trying to construct the framework to justify isolationism and promote a Christo-Fascist society.
I say this as someone who thanks the internet (especially in earlier decades) for changing multiple generations of my family from rural conservative Republican to progressive-left. The same reason they attack publicly-funded news like NPR or PBS, or Big Bird and Mr. Rogers.
These things teach critical-thinking and kindness and make fearmongering less effective.
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The article site itself is a good example of what's wrong with the internet.
The guardian used a "pay or ok" model for cookie acceptance.
Archive link to avoid that nonsense: https://archive.ph/pHNdt
I have a simple fix but that which is difficult by virtue of momentum of the people. Don't visit corporate websites. Avoid google, microsoft, meta, reddit, youtube. Its much more difficult to avoid: whatsapp and maybe messenger if your family is on it. I would argue for photos and online drive, proton is good but i guess the CEO is trying to become/has become a tech bro like the others. so you have to figure out if alternatives like immich (self hosting) or other hosting providers are not fascist.
We should talk about these alternatives all the time to get them into everyday lingo such that people recommend those to others.
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WWW has been a complete crapshow ever since it started simply because it became popular.
It was designed to serve documents over the internet, except everyone co-opted for their own needs like websites, APIs, etc.
That left us with broken as hell crap at every layer from the joke that is HTML/CSS, the clownshow that is HTTP, and the circus that is JavaScript.
And don't even get the started on the mountain of vulnerabilities being stupid obvious crap that wouldn't dare to fly in even basic GNU utilities at the time.
Adding insult to injury, this guy hasn't even provided a valid solution to this mess like hyphanet or the very newly released freenet.
Which by the way tries to hack cheat the system with WebAssembly so that it doesn't have to deal with HTTPS directly since its an exclusive client server protocol.
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“The internet” should just be dumb pipes that transport bits. Period.
A series of tubes, if you will. Not a big truck.
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the search providers (especially that famously 'not evil' one) had a huge hand in centralising and then gatekeeping access to 'the web'. They have such a disproportionately powerful effect on how users discover content, and huge power to drive self-fulfilling 'network effects' where people go where people already are, which has become so normalised that most people couldn't imagine 'the web' without them.
i'm not suggesting it was ever realistic or possible, but what we needed was for that one search provider and indexer of content to be broken up, partially nationalised, and partially integrated into the network specification itself. Only they are powerful enough to become a model for how to functionally disentangle their operations into public and private parts.
the only alternative is to break the centralisation of the web as china is doing and other BRICS nations intend to do, by creating 'national internets' which in some ways federate together and in other ways do not. I don't like this model of development for the future of the internet but the security considerations of the present require this kind of approach.
Can we change the title to web inventor? I am guilty of using them interchangeably as well, but he did not invent the internet. And I used the internet before the web existed lol.
Yes PLEASE! The Internet is so, so much more than the Web, it existed before it and it will exist long after the Web has been gone.
The INTERNET as a whole also has still many places that are still healthy and far away from enshittification.
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I don't know, the thing about the internet is that it does bring a ton of value, and operating it does have costs in turn. Maybe Sir Tim is right about DNS being the point where it got commercial, but it was going to happen somehow. Arxiv and Wikipedia still exist, but how do you do Amazon non-commercially? Even YouTube is a challenge.
There used to be a sort of mantra that technology was neutral and people are good and bad. But actually, that’s not true of things on the web
Arguably, that's not the distinction. Technologies can be explicitly of control or of chaos. And then that relative structure or freedom can itself be used for good or for evil.
A central platform is of control, Lemmy or Linux is of chaos. And obviously we lean towards the latter a lot, but for some things even Lemmy wants central control and monitoring, so it's not evil, exactly.
How you do amazon nonprofit is easy. Its already a giant planned economy, just take the profit out and make every vendor pay the cost for using it, Servers delivery etc. The workers would get payed well and the incentive from the public to support it is there, people want this convience and are willing to spend for it.
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It doesn't matter how noble your intent when inventing or researching, once business has control of something, it is used to gain power and control over people. All you scientists and engineers and researchers need to starts accepting your own contribution to this monster, held accountable for the technologies you help businesses unleash on all of us.
I agree with the first part, but scientists and engineers are not that much more complicit than literally everyone with a job. Those businesses couldn't have done that without marketing, hr, janitors, tradespeople, lawyers etc etc etc either. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and there is no ethical job.
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I think your coming on a little heavy, if you are trying to say that inventors should build systems that are resilient to misuse, I whole heartadly agree. But how your post seems it would imply that no one should be inventing anything that could possibly be corrupted or face the consequences, which is quite a huge pendulum swing that wouldn't cause the outcome I think you are looking for.
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AI slop and the legions of uncritical adoring emoji-filled all caps comments under every garbage video is already the end of humanity. We're done.
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