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Tech

What If Mark Zuckerberg Invented the Web

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's birthday on Friday was probably not a terribly celebratory one. He’s scrambling to pick up the pieces from the site’s growing problems, Facebook’s core mission: “giving people the power to share and make the world more

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's birthday on Friday was probably not a terribly celebratory one. He's scrambling to pick up the pieces from the site's growing problems, problems that belie Facebook's core mission: "giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." As Randall Stross pointed out in the Times this weekend:

…the online world outside of Facebook is already a very open and connected place, thank you very much. Densely interlinked Web pages, blogs, news articles and Tweets are all visible to anyone and everyone. Instead of contributing to this interconnected, open Web world, the growing popularity of Facebook is draining it of attention, energy and posts that are in public view….

Susan Herring, professor of information science at Indiana University, sees it this way: "What the statistics point to is a rise in Facebook, a decline in blogging, and before that, a decline in personal Web pages. The trend is clear, she said — Facebook is displacing these other forms of online publication.

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What if Zuck had been born two decades earlier – or invested his billions in building a time machine – so that he might have invented the internet, rather than Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN? At HuffPo, David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center (whom we met at ROFLCon), paints the picture for us.

  • Mark Zuckerberg forms a company and develops the Web as a commercial enterprise.

  • MZ owns and controls the HTML standard. Nothing changes in it unless MZ thinks it's a good idea.

  • MZ owns and controls the client — MZ Explorer — that uses that standard. While other apps are permitted API access, the browser is whatever MZ decides to give us.

  • Users can only create pages on MZ's server, subject to MZ's content policies.

  • MZ decides how much about the author of each page is automatically disclosed, and he changes his mind every few months.

  • There is no "View Source" so users can easily figure out how to become developers.

  • Innovators' creations are limited to the API access that MZ allows and are subject to the changes in policy and pricing structures that MZ decides on.

  • Users have no systematic, assured way of transferring out of the Web all of the pages they've created within it. Do they even own the pages they've created?

  • If the right deal is struck, the Web could be sold to a media company at any moment.

It sounds ludicrous, but do your own thought experiment and agree that even if it wouldn't be "boring, small and of little consequence," the Web would have been very different had corporate influences – not scientific research at a government funded lab – led to its inception. Weinberg's hypothetical is a reminder that the more influential Facebook (or any company) becomes over our Web experience, the more important it will be to remember the virtues of a network we now mostly take for granted.