Web’s inventor tackles mobile

While Al Gore is busy polishing his Nobel Peace Prize — one some people question the veracity of based on the fact that he didn’t do more to address environmental issues when he was actually in office — the guy who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web was in Boston on Wednesday talking to a room full of people interested in the convergence of the Internet and mobile devices.

Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (aka W3C), stepped to the podium at the Mobile Internet World conference after business leaders from MTV and Sprint Nextel spoke about their own plans for wireless.

The scientist recounted his decision-making in exercising an open approach when first joining hypertext and the Net, and said that enlisting an open architectural blueprint was critical to the eventual explosion of the Web.

Berners-Lee essentially warned the assembled device, software and content development honchos that they should knock down the walled-off mobile Web environments they’ve built over the past few years in favor of supporting more industry standards.

The use of open standards is also a central tent of the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative, he said, which is aimed at advancing handheld browsing technologies.

The good news for the expert was that the other conference speakers seemed largely in agreement, with many harping on the same themes and promising to work together via efforts such as Google’s recently-announced Open Handset Alliance consortium — which backs use of the search giant’s new Android mobile Linux platform.

Excerpts from Berners-Lee’s original speech follow, and summarize some of the points he made:

“We are at an epic point in telecommunications history, when the mobile platforms discussed here, and the Internet platforms which have enabled such a spectacular growth and innovation, are poised, if we manage this well, to merge.”

“There are plenty of ways in which we could fail to pull this off, and leave ourselves incapacitated, with innovation stifled. By ‘we’ here I mean the whole community of manufacturers, service providers, content providers, consumers, and to a limited extent, legislators.”

“I wanted to design the World Wide Web, as I decided to call it, to be usable for any data on any system. I had watched the failure of so many sophisticated documentation access systems which constrained their users to use one type of computer, or operating system. If really anything could be on the Web, then the Web technology should demand almost nothing of its users.”

“The Web is designed, in turn, to be universal: to include anything and anyone. This universality includes an independence of hardware device and operating system, as I mentioned, and clearly this includes the mobile platform.”

“The Web worked because of a number of technical and social reasons. It worked because there was no central bottleneck for traffic, no central link database to be kept consistent, no central place to go and register a new page or a new Web site.”

“So what else does it take to make an open Internet platform? It takes, mainly, common standards. The innovation of the WWW was possible because the standards for TCP/IP were already implemented in an interoperable way all over the planet, in advance of the innovation.”

“When you want to make a foundation technology, you need to look ahead. You need to put aside the short term return on investment questions and look at the long term.

A great example of this is the patent question. In 1989 my colleagues in the Internet community would not have dreamed of patenting the ideas in the Internet protocols.”

“One of the most difficult things for some companies to learn is that this is not a zero-sum game. We are so used to battling over a fixed market, or battling over fixed resources, that we tend to assume everything is such that we can only win what our competitors lose. But when we make a whole new market space, like the Web, or like GSM actually, then we are in fact together battling the human condition such as inefficiency, poverty and ignorance.”

“The choice is the new platform being a privately owned walled garden , or a competitive open platform. Both models can work in the medium term. But the open model opens up new things which we can only try to imagine.”

“So when we look at the choices for the mobile devices, it is clear that they must continue on the path to an open Web platform. That is what the Mobile Web Initiative is about. Huge new markets, and huge opportunities for humanity, depend on this. We know in general how to do it. But there is a lot to do.”