Reweaving the web

TIM BERNERS-LEE ends “Weaving the Web”, a book written in the late 1990s, on an optimistic note: “The experience of seeing the web take off by the grassroots effort of thousands gives me tremendous hope that…we can collectively make our world what we want.” Nearly two decades later the inventor of the web no longer sounds as cheerful. “The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for micro-blogging,” he declared on June 7th at a conference in San Francisco.

Mr Berners-Lee’s observation that the internet has become heavily centralised is not new, yet in recent months warnings such as his have grown louder. Pundits estimate that Google’s many sites attract an estimated 40% of all traffic on the web. Facebook’s apps are similarly dominant on smartphones. Together these two firms will soon rake in two-thirds of all online-advertising revenues. The takeover of LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, by Microsoft, a software and cloud-computing giant, will only reinforce such worries.