Brewster Kahle, the Internet’s most famous librarian and an inductee of the Internet Hall of Fame, believes that the time has come to build a better Web.
The problem, he says, is that the Internet is no longer either private or secure. So his argument, summarized in a white paper entitled “Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Decentralized Web”, says that we now need to rebuilt the Web to ensure that it guarantees both privacy and security for its users.
He launched his new mission in June with a high profile San Francisco event featuring other Internet hall-of-famers like Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf. But Kahle – who pioneered the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine which has stored almost 500 billion web pages for the public record – doesn’t want to go back to the Internet’s pre commercial origins.
The technology now exists, he says, to create websites which can be hosted “everywhere and nowhere”. Finally, he says, we have the technology to build both a genuinely public and commercial Internet which protects rather than exploits its users. And his call is for start-up entrepreneurs to join his mission.
As always, many thanks to the folks at CALinnovates for their support in the production of this interview.