Social networking is undermining the web, says web inventor

Tim Berners-Lee said that the storing of data behind virtual corporate walls on social networking sites and the deals being cut between content companies and telecoms operators are threatening the founding principle of the web, which is that systems should all work together based on sets of agreed open standards.

Berners-Lee created the world wide web when, in December 1990, he used a browser on his computer to look at the world's first website, on the same computer.

The British computer scientist has written of his concerns about the web's future in Scientific American ahead of the web's 20th birthday.

"The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles," he said.

"The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles," he warned. "Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments – totalitarian and democratic alike – are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights."

Berners-Lee said that the web had become not only a good way to share information or access content, but a crucial part of the makeup of society.

"The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium," he said. "It brings principles established in the US Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected."

He said that anyone concerned about changes that threatened that openness should guard against complacency.

"People seem to think the Web is some sort of piece of nature, and if it starts to wither, well, that’s just one of those unfortunate things we can’t help. Not so," he said. "We create the Web, by designing computer protocols and software; this process is completely under our control. We choose what properties we want it to have and not have ... the scientific community and the press must make sure the Web’s principles remain intact – not just to preserve what we have gained but to benefit from the great advances that are still to come."

Berners-Lee identified an erosion of net neutrality as a major threat to the web. "Cable television companies that sell Internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment," he said.

Another problem was the way that social networking services such as Facebook take information you give them and store them according to their own – not the web's – rules.

He said that web publishing was open and universal because pages are written in a standard language, uploaded via a standard protocol and located according to standardised URLs (universal resource locators).

He said that social networking systems promote a distance between the open web and their own data collections.

"The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a [URL]," he said. "Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform – a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space."

Companies such as Apple, he said, are building services such as iTunes which run on the internet but are self-contained, are not part of the web. Magazine publishers are following suit, he said.

"The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone 'apps' rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or email a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it," he said. "It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time."