[mahranch]

> The web was intended to be

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. You cannot say what the web was intended to be because you had no hand in inventing it. You do not know the mind of Tim Berners-Lee.

In fact, I argue the opposite - he had a vision of a global hyperlinked information system. While he wanted the protocol itself to be free (a move away from gopher), the information itself had no such protections. And that is precisely what we have today; it doesn't cost anything to use the WWW protocol. His vision has been fulfilled.

Now, the information (the content) itself is another matter. IP laws exist for a reason, people want to be paid for the content they create. They have ownership of that content. Whether it's the latest episode of game of thrones, a video game IP, or a book I wrote, the law protects my intellectual property. If I want to charge for access to that content, I'm more than within my legal right. Whether it's accessed over WWW, a cable box, or purchased from a book store, it makes no difference to my legal protections.

[pwinnski]

You write as if Tim Berners-Lee died in 1990.

I think it's quite possible to know what TBL thinks about privacy-invasive javascript, given that he's very much alive and writing about such things to this day.

https://webfoundation.org/2017/03/web-turns-28-letter/