Can we repair the internet? Three new books propose remedies that run the gamut from government regulation to user responsibility. From addictive algorithms to exploitative apps, data mining to misinformation, the internet today can be a hazardous place. Books by three influential figures--the intellect behind "net neutrality," a former Meta executive, and the web's own inventor--propose radical approaches to fixing it. But are these luminaries the right people for the job? Though each shows conviction, and even sometimes inventiveness, the solutions they present reveal blind spots.

In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again. Berners-Lee is building tools that aim to resist the Big Tech platforms, give users control over their own data, and prevent A.I. from hollowing out the open web. Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on "Jeopardy!," Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, in 1989, but people informed of this often respond with a joke: Wasn't that Al Gore? Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you're reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He's the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called "the gentle singularity"--or else buries us in slop--that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness. Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain. An emeritus professor at Oxford and M.I.T., he divides his time between the U.K., Canada, and Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Rosemary Leith, live in a stout greige house older than the Republic. On the summer morning when I visited, geese honked and cicadas whined. Leith, an investor and a nonprofit director who co-founded a dot-com-era women's portal called Flametree, greeted me at the door. "We're basically guardians of the house," she said, showing me its antique features. I almost missed Berners-Lee in the converted-barn kitchen, standing, expectantly, in a blue plaid shirt. He shook my hand, then glanced at Leith. Minutes later, he and I were gliding across a pond behind the house. Berners-Lee is bronzed and wiry, with sharp cheekbones and faraway blue eyes, the right one underscored by an X-shaped wrinkle. A twitchier figure emerged when he spoke.

One evening in the spring of 2015, I filmed a 15-second video out the window of an Amtrak train as it rattled across the barren flatlands of southern New Jersey. All you see is a slanted rush of white and yellow lights. I can't remember why I made it. Until a few days ago, I had never even watched it. And yet for the past nine years, that video has been sitting on a server in a data center somewhere, silently and invisibly taking a very small toll on our planet.

More than a decade ago, in a prescient essay for Scientific American, the inventor of the World Wide Web denounced what Facebook and other tech giants were doing to his signature invention. "Why should you care?" Tim Berners-Lee wrote at the time. "Because the Web is yours." These companies, he warned, were restructuring the web itself, turning an expanse of interconnected websites all built on the same open infrastructure into a series of "fragmented islands" where users were kept hostage. On Facebook's island, he wrote, people give over their entire digital life for the chance to connect with their friends, but have no way to transfer their information to any other platform.

The inventor of the World Wide Web (also known as the Web), Tim Berners-Lee said that in the future, people will have their own personal AI assistant, similar to ChatGPT. In a recent episode of CNBC's Beyond the Valley podcast, Berners-Lee said that his new company envisions people having online'pods' where all of their personal data is stored. Inrupt, a startup co-founded by Berners-Lee, aims to provide web users with a single login that can be used across multiple websites. Inrupt intends to store individual users' data in digital containers as part of its work on developing that technology. The pods will be capable of granting websites or services access to some or all of a person's personal information, ranging from sleeping patterns to shopping preferences, reports Fortune.

Netra, co-founded by Shashi Kant SM '06, uses artificial intelligence to help companies sort and manage video content. At any given moment, many thousands of new videos are being posted to sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. An increasing number of those videos are being recorded and streamed live. But tech and media companies still struggle to understand what's going in all that content. Now MIT alumnus-founded Netra is using artificial intelligence to improve video analysis at scale.

At any given moment, many thousands of new videos are being posted to sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. An increasing number of those videos are being recorded and streamed live. But tech and media companies still struggle to understand what's going in all that content. Now MIT alumnus-founded Netra is using artificial intelligence to improve video analysis at scale. The company's system can identify activities, objects, emotions, locations, and more to organize and provide context to videos in new ways.

Netra uses artificial intelligence to help companies understand and organize their video content. Netra, co-founded by Shashi Kant SM '06, uses artificial intelligence to help companies sort and manage video content. At any given moment, many thousands of new videos are being posted to sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. An increasing number of those videos are being recorded and streamed live. But tech and media companies still struggle to understand what's going in all that content.

Google's testimony to an Australian Senate committee on Friday threatening to withdraw its search services from Australia is chilling to anyone who cares about democracy. It marks the latest escalation in the globally significant effort to regulate the way the big tech platforms use news content to drive their advertising businesses and the catastrophic impact on the news media across the world. The news bargaining code, which would require Google and Facebook to negotiate a fair price for the use of news content, is the product of an 18-month process driven by the competition regulator. That legislation is currently before the Australian parliament, where a Senate committee is taking final submissions from interested parties. The Google bombshell makes explicit what has been a slowly escalating threat that a binding code would not be tenable.

Computer Science in the 1960s to 80s spent a lot of effort making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. Expressing constraints, relationships and processing instructions in less powerful languages increases the flexibility with which information can be reused: the less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language. I chose HTML not to be a programming language because I wanted different programs to do different things with it: present it differently, extract tables of contents, index it, and so on. Though the Rule of Least Power targeted programming languages themselves, rather than language features, I think the same ideas still apply.