Internet techies understand the technical aspects of the internet, but they flunk out when it comes to the political aspects of social systems. In this article Berners-Lee shows his social system ignorance by naive statements such as these:
- ... Berners-Lee argues that letting commercial entities pull levers to try to fix such a wide-ranging problem is a bad idea — arguing that any fixes companies come up with will inexorably be restrained by their profit-maximizing context and also that they amount to another unilateral impact on users.
- “Companies are aware of the problems and are making efforts to fix them — with each change they make affecting millions of people,” he writes now. “The responsibility — and sometimes burden — of making these decisions falls on companies that have been built to maximise profit more than to maximise social good. A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives may help ease those tensions.”
It's not "platform power" that is killing the web, it is ruling class power using the system of capitalism that is not only crushing the internet, but all institutions of society for the benefit of this tiny class. Apparently Oxford and Harvard, both top capitalist ruling class educational institutions where Berners-Lee and Hughes studied, failed to teach them about how the capitalist system works: how the magic of the "invisible hand" and the sanctity of private (economic) property, the foundations of capitalism, result in concentrated wealth which feeds the addiction to power that humans are so vulnerable to, and which, in turn, results in ruling class exploitation over the other social classes, class war, extreme inequality, destructive wars between capitalist nations, etc.
