EUUS.html
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<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META name="Author" content="Tim Berners-Lee">
<META name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/2.01Gold (Win32)">
<TITLE>The Future of the Web and Europe</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#fef3ba">
<H1>
The Web; Europe and the US; Diversity and Harmony
</H1>
<P>
Draft for a Time International article on the Web, and the question of whether
Europe will necessarily be dominated by the US. June 1996. Edited a
bit in 1997. The Time International article was seperately edited and is
therefore different.
<P>
<HR>
<P>
<I>Ok, so the first thing you imagine is that the future of networking in
Europe is going to be much like that in the US, only a few years behind.
and there's plenty of reasons to think that. It's the Anglophone market block
of North America which gives the US launch of anything a jump start on the
a Eurolaunch. Its the cultural deference that the US is a nation of doers
rather than talkers. There's the lack of entrepreneurial spirit, which in
Europe sometimes we believe left for good on the Santa Maria and the
Mayflower.</I> <I>Gimme a break...</I>
<P>
<HR>
<P>
<P>
When I designed a global hypertext system, and decided for better or
worse to call it "World Wide Web", I was pretty much a European - an
Englishman working in Switzerland and living alternatelly in France and
Switzerland. I belonged to a number of different overlapping communities.
I was also a member of the international community of high energy physics,
and of another community, the global internet community of the strange, informal,
tolerant and predominantly technical people who sent news articles and electronic
mail over the Internet. Neither of these communities were related to geographical
borders. Since then, the spread of the WWW has left many people asking whether
in a few years the geographical boundaries will be completely irrelevant,
and if they are, what will be left.
<P>
This leads to some fundamental questions as to what it will be like to exist
on this earth when we all have access to the network. Things are changing
very rapidly, and any doubts we have about the developed world being online
are rapidly disappearing. Predictions of the effect on society range from
the horrific to the idyllic, and sometimes the difference between the those
two is a matter of point of view. I'll consider some worries about that far
off future, but first let's think abut the next few years.
<P>
The Web has rushed through the United States like a forest fire in a way
it cannot in Europe. The heat of excitement in the content already on the
web fuels the pouring of greater and greater resources into providing more
content, more facilities, better organization and cataloging. The spread
of servers fuels the spread of the clients and vice-versa, as each morsel
of information, no matter how esoteric, is available to anyone who may be
interested in it throughout that largely mono-language monoculture which
is, (in broad oversimplification typical of a European!), the United States.
There is an incredible economy of scale.
<P>
Europe, however has firebreaks between its cultures. The vicious circle of
growing server deployment and readership exists, but it happens slower. If
you put up a web page on, say, the local breeding grounds of the gerbil,
you will attract gerbil fanciers only of your on language. If you start a
discussion on the delights of Real Ale, the wine-drinkers further south won't
contribute to your audience. Add to this the historical fact that the Internet
was invented in the US, and that in European states in the past an emphasis
on an independent set of protocols has manacled the development of
communications, it is not surprising that Europe seems to be following the
US a few years behind.
<P>
That is not to say there are not a lot of things which European states can
do individually and collectively to make things happen faster. Allowing a
stiff open competition for getting Internet packets into and out of people's
homes as cheaply and efficiently as possible is part of it. Telecommunication
monopolies cannot fall too soon. Although in the US the market seems to be
set for funding the long distance links indirectly through individual
subscriptions, there is no evidence to me that this is working for international
traffic. When people ask whether there is a possibility that the Internet
effectively grind to a halt under the load, I answer that it already has.
The transatlantic public Internet is overloaded to an appalling extent: access
is slow to unusable. In the long term, many argue that the problem of bandwidth
is in the "last mile", from the nearest exchange (sorry, the nearest Internet
router) to your home. In the short term, though, I am quite happy to
browse at 28.8kB if only my share of the long distance links can keep up.
For Europe as an entity to hang together in cyberspace, it must have good
international links within and to the US. If market forces are not paying
for this, then as a non-expert in telecommunications policy I can only
conclude that it is up to the governments to step in and fix it. Bandwidth
is one of the simpler things to fix.
<P>
If all the saturated international links were suddenly to be upgraded to
ten times there bandwidth, I am sure they would be saturated again the moment
folks found out about it. There is a lot of potential use of the web now
which is just abandoned because it is so excrutiatingly slow. The moment
that the time it takes to follow a hypertext link is again more like
a second or two, use will soar again. And if you believe Europe getting on
line, this is what you are after.
<P>
Yes, a lot of people in Europe mostly browse the US, as that is where most
of the content is. If anyone should think that slowing down transatlantic
traffic is a solution to this, let them think again. To do so would be to
give up and imagine that once Europe has caught on, that it will have nothing
to say for itself, nothing to create, no culture to put across and celebrate.
If you think that, stop reading, stop thinking.
<P>
So in Europe we have a challenge to communicate more between cultures. The
great thing, of course, is that if one does go to the effort of bridging
the gaps, the rewards are so much greater. The web removes the geographical
impediment to mixing - but will the cultural barriers survive? Will we end
up with a global monoculture, or a mix of cyberspace meeting places of unlimited
variety? We have to gaze into our crystal ball, imagine a wired European
household.
<P>
Let's suppose we end up with screens everywhere. I call them "screens" rather
than "computers" or "televisions" because that is primarily what you experience,
and because the insides of a computer and the insides of a TV will become
indistinguishable. Imagine we have a big screen in the living room, a small
portable one on a bracket on the kitchen wall, and enough pocket-sized ones
that, like ball point pens, no matter how many you lose you can always find
another one. Each provides a window onto the universal information space,
the Web, though they differ in the quality and speed of access.
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<I>In your (Dutch, say) suburban home, the kitchen screen's preset buttons
are set to your favourite places: the weather map, the school Parent Reminder
page, an oldies station and the family's mailboxes. One is set to the web
site of a small italian town twinned with yours, where you were learning
some language and art from some net freinds in the rotary club there. Ready
for a change of culture, you link though to Italy while filling the dishwasher.
Each of you has been brought up with a different slant on the Renaissance
painters, and you are fascinated to learn more about the Italian scene.</I>
<P>
<I>Suddenly your conversation is interrupted as in skates your eldest,
with a crowd of friends, He has just reached the age of digtal choice. Your
rights to select material suitable for his viewing have ended, and he flourishes
his newfound adultcard with mock carelesness as he authenticates himself
to the livingroom screen. The preset buttons now all glow with his personal
choice of gruesome entertainment. A face floats across the screen: te search
machine has shown him a random one of the 643,768 people world over whose
personal reading profile is identical to his. Pretty cool figure, he smirks.
To be on the top of the normal curve you have to surf carefully, and always
stick to straight media gulch sites. It takes a certain sense to select only
the places which you can guess the majority of your teen group will be chosing.
He knows that though he might live in a small town in the Netherlands, he
is right in the center of the main trend, he feels the strenth of being exactly
in tune with all his seen and unsen colleagues. And he knows he wears and
eats exactly as they do.</I>
<P>
<I>You feel uneasy about this, and discuss it with your Italian friend. She
is concerned too, though she has a refreshingly different attitude to the
problem. Her eldest is just the same, but she is convinced he will be over
it by the time he's nine. Your offspring are making a headlong dash for the
oblivion of conformity. But aren't you also quiety mixing your Dutch and
Italian cultures, and silently htreatening both?</I>
<P>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>
European countries have been studying the pros and cons of sharing or protecting
their culture for a long time before the Web came along. We have lost Cornish,
but there is an attempt to preserv French by law. It is reasonable to be
worried. Most of the structre of our society has been based on geographical
boundaries of one sort or another. The stability of kingdoms has been
determined by such geographical constraints such as the time it takes to
gather troops, or ride to the capital with a warning of incoming invasion.
A huge amount of the hierarchical structrue of or world is based on the two
dimensional space which the Web is pulling from under our feet. However,
my observation of that early Internet culture was that geography-free though
it was, it ended up dividing into smaller and smaller enclaves of person
specific interest.
<P>
In fact, theer are two equally frightening prospects. On the one hand is
the descent to the lowest common denominator, often represented by US
fast food and cartoons, with the loss all that is rich and diverse. On
the other, is an extreme of diversity. When anyone can filter mail so that
they can read only mesages from people who think the same weird things as
themselves, and when what they read on the Web they only find by following
links from sites of the same strange cult, will they be able to gif themselves
intoa cultural pothole so deep and so steep that when eventually they physially
meet a real person on the street, the lack of common understadning will be
total, and the only fom of communication left will be to shoot them?
<P>
The key to avoiding each of these is in our own individual behaviour. The
univerality of eth web includes the fact that the information space can represent
anything from ones personal private jottings to a polished global publication.
We as people can, with or without the web, interact on all scale. We are
like pixels in a mandelbrot set: we are part of the detail on every level
of scale. By being involved on every level, we ourselves form the ties
which wevae th elevels together into a sort of consistency, balancing the
homogneity and the heterogeneity, the harmony and the diversity. We
can be involved on a personal, family, town, corporate, state, national,
union, and international levels. Culture exists at all levels, and we should
give it a weighted balanced respect at each level. In Europe, there is perhaps
one more level of culture. Our job of maintaining that balance is just
that much more difficult, and that much more rewarding.
<P>
<ADDRESS>
(c)TimBL 1996,1997
</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>