Where Would We Be Today if the World Wide Web had Been Patented?
By Rob Scott
August 15, 2011
August 15, 2011
- August 6 marked the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee publishing the first website at CERN. Techdirt provides a few guesses regarding where we might stand today had Berners-Lee sought and received a patent for the World Wide Web.
- The article suggests that innovation would be dramatically limited and rather than an open World Wide Web, we would be using proprietary, walled gardens such as AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy. The idea of open Internet development would be hampered by lawsuits.
- Search functionality would most likely be dismal (no Google, for example), and limited to proprietary systems. We may also not have seen the meteoric rise of smartphones without the Web.
- And try to imagine this: “Most people’s use of online services would be more about ‘consumption’ than ‘communication.’ There would still be chat rooms and such, but there wouldn’t be massive public communication developments like blogs and Twitter. There might be some social networking elements, but they would be very rudimentary within the walled garden.”
- What are your thoughts? If Berners-Lee had not been so generous, would innovation be stalled in patent hell? Or would we have moved forward with other systems in development at the time?
2 Comments
What a fascinating question…does shine a bright light on the patent and litigation wars that are going on right now. Will further innovation, especially by start-ups, be stifled? Sure feels that way.
What a fascinating question…does shine a bright light on the patent and litigation wars that are going on right now. Will further innovation, especially by start-ups, be stifled? Sure feels that way.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.