You’re kidding right? His true legacy is contributing to cybercrime… Not, you know, inventing the World Wide Web?

There are benefits to be gained and things to be lost…
Some people in some situations would prefer to be jailed but safe then exposed to wild web. That’s what partially drives Appleand some other products with “Gate Keeprs” these days. Yes they win ease of use in anticipated use cases, ability to optimize better for those and various “guarantees” from manufacturer no PC/software manufacturer would give you. But they loose all those unanticipated or unwelcome by “Gate Keeper” use cases and frame their minds and ideas to frames imposed by the “Gate Keeper”. Noticed few times myself how I stopped to think outside the box Apple made being an owner of iPhone…

And then there is software as service. Some (including me sometimes) would prefer small and weak devices attached to the cloud that we do not control, own or even know much about. We obviously win some things here but also loose some others. Like you can’t take your information out of the service often. Or that you can’t keep old version of the service when they roll out a new version(you can with desktop software).

Also both such service and such devices allow great deal of control to those who has power over various things be it Apple banning Flash, RIA suing Apple to force Apple to ban say torrent apps, say Microsoft suing Google for Docs features forcing them to remove some crucial for Google clients features after they payed for them, or government forcing to remove features, add wiretapping etc etc… Those all are problems of centralized solutions. Ones that lost completely in 90 to the open web but now coming back as open and not controlled web is not perfect and has its own problems. Viruses, hacking, demand from user to have level of expertise to be able to use it efficiently, safely.

In the end all those things are compromises. In 90 centralized and controlled compromise lost to open web. Now as more less techsevy people are coming to the web balance shifts back… I guess we will just have some swing back to feel again why such things lost in 90 and then find new balance between controlled and centralized modes and open and decentralized ones.

Tim’s WWW is very different ‘in content’ then it was in the early days. There are lots of new additional content source types today. The stuff that was public then *is still* public now. On limitations we’re talking rights protected music and peoples personal details here which will always have privacy chains and limited access.

The magazines as flat iPad apps issue is a different story, but if the content isn’t being delivered online anyway, or it’s protected like it always was I don’t think he can argue we’re moving to a state of WWW lockdown.

What we can say with surety is that the Web is vital to cybercrime. That is Prof Berners Lee true legacy. Worse still is that there were plenty of cybersecurity experts around in the 1980′s, any of whom I am sure would have been happy to advise him, but he deliberately chose to ignore their accumulated wisdom. Deliberately, in other words, chose to endanger you, me, and everyone. It’s a shame that in twenty years not one journalist has asked him to justify this criminally irresponsible decision.