World Wide Web

A pithy little declaration.

This document articulates W3C’s mission, its values, its organizational principles, and our vision for W3C as an organization in the context of our vision for the Web itself. The goal of this vision is not to predict the future, but to define shared principles to guide our decisions.

The goals of this document are to:

• Help the world understand what W3C is, what it does, and why it matters
• Communicate shared values and principles of the W3C community
• Be opinionated enough to provide a framework for making decisions, particularly on controversial issues
• Be timeless enough to guide W3C yet flexible enough to evolve when needed

A rep for Paramount told IndieWire: “As part of broader website changes across Paramount, we have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites, driving fans to Paramount+ to watch their favorite shows.”

For now though, many of these series are not currently available on Paramount+, such as “The Colbert Report” or “The Nightly Show.” Even “The Daily Show” has only two of the most recent seasons, encompassing 2024 and 2023, available, despite decades of the show’s history. “South Park” clips used to be hosted on Comedy Central’s website, but the only place to watch full episodes of those are via Max, not Paramount+.

The likely reason for this? Cost cutting. In a town hall this week, Paramount’s “Office of the CEO” including co-chiefs George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy, and Brian Robbins, expressed plans to save $500 million in order to stave off profit drops and one day make Paramount+ profitable.

Many users of web search engines have been complaining in recent years about the supposedly decreasing quality of search results. This is often attributed to an increasing amount of search-engine-optimized but low-quality content. Evidence for this has always been anecdotal, yet it’s not unreasonable to think that popular online marketing strategies such as affiliate marketing incentivize the mass production of such content to maximize clicks. Since neither this complaint nor affiliate marketing as such have received much attention from the IR community, we hereby lay the groundwork by conducting an in-depth exploratory study of how affiliate content affects today’s search engines. We monitored Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for a year on 7,392 product review queries. Our findings suggest that all search engines have significant problems with highly optimized (affiliate) content—more than is representative for the entire web according to a baseline retrieval system on the ClueWeb22. Focussing on the product review genre, we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do. Of all affiliate networks, Amazon Associates is by far the most popular. We further observe an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns. However, we also notice that the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry—a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention.

A good explainer:

In 2017, the body responsible for standardizing web browser technologies, W3C, introduced Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)—thus bringing with it the end of competitive indie web browsers.

No longer is it possible to build your own web browser capable of consuming some of the most popular content on the web. Websites like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and others require copyright content protection which is only accessible through browser vendors who have license agreements with large corporations.

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These roadblocks were primarily introduced to appease the media industry.

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Since the introduction of EME to web standards, the ability for new browsers to compete has become restricted by gatekeepers, which goes against the promises of the platform.

The truth is many of the ills of today’s internet have a single thing in common: they are built on a system of corporate surveillance. Multiple companies, large and small, collect data about where we go, what we do, what we read, who we communicate with, and so on. They use this data in multiple ways and, if it suits their business model, may sell it to anyone who wants it—including law enforcement. Addressing this shared reality will better promote human rights and civil liberties, while simultaneously holding space for free expression, creativity, and innovation than many of the issue-specific bills we’ve seen over the past decade.

In other words, whatever online harms you want to alleviate, you can do it better, with a broader impact, if you do privacy first.

There are two clear, connected issues to address. The first is the extent of power concentration, which contradicts the decentralised spirit I originally envisioned. This has segmented the web, with a fight to keep users hooked on one platform to optimise profit through the passive observation of content. This exploitative business model is particularly grave in this year of elections that could unravel political turmoil. Compounding this issue is the second, the personal data market that has exploited people’s time and data with the creation of deep profiles that allow for targeted advertising and ultimately control over the information people are fed.

How has this happened? Leadership, hindered by a lack of diversity, has steered away from a tool for public good and one that is instead subject to capitalist forces resulting in monopolisation. Governance, which should correct for this, has failed to do so, with regulatory measures being outstripped by the rapid development of innovation, leading to a widening gap between technological advancements and effective oversight.

The future hinges on our ability to both reform the current system and create a new one that genuinely serves the best interests of humanity. To achieve this, we must break down data silos to encourage collaboration, create market conditions in which a diversity of options thrive to fuel creativity, and shift away from polarising content to an environment shaped by a diversity of voices and perspectives that nurture empathy and understanding.

When we started TinEye, we had a simple vision: help users search using images. Today, we are delivering image search solutions to a wide range of businesses where image search is mission critical.

Ours is a fast-moving industry. We measure our work in tickets, sprints, and projects. But that can make it hard to see the bigger picture sometimes. In this talk we’ll attempt to pull back and measure our progress in terms of decades. We might even attempt to gaze into the future…

Think of every enshittification as being preceded by an argument. Some people say, “We should extract this surplus: it will make our bosses happy, make our shareholders richer, and increase our bonuses.”

When the people on the other side of that argument said, “If we do what you suggest, it will be make our product worse and it will cost us more money than it will make us,” they tend to win the argument.

When all they can say is, “Yes, this will make us more money, but it will make the product worse,” they forever lose the argument.

The elimination of competition – and the ensu­ing capture of regulation – removed the discipline imposed by the fear of customers defecting as the product degraded. The harder it is for users to leave a service, the easier it is for the factions within a company to best their rivals in the debate over whether they should be allowed to make the service worse.

That’s what changed. That’s what’s different. Tech didn’t get worse because techies got worse. Tech got worse because the condition of the ex­ternal world made it easier for the worst techies to win arguments.

The timeline around a stable channel rollout is worded kind of strangely. The company says: "We expect it will take at least a month to observe and stabilize the changes in pre-stable before expanding the rollout to stable channel Chrome, where it will also gradually roll out over time. The exact timing may vary depending on the data collected, and during this time, we will keep you informed about our progress." It's unclear what "data" Google is concerned with. It's not the end of the world if an extension crashes—it turns off and stops working until the user reboots the extension. Maybe the company is concerned about how many people Google "Firefox" once their ad-blocker stops working.

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Google's sales pitch for Manifest V3 is that, by limiting extensions, the browser can be lighter on resources, and Google can protect your privacy from extension developers. With more limited tools, you'll be more exposed to the rest of the Internet, though, and a big part of the privacy-invasive Internet is Google. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called Google's description of Manifest V3 "Deceitful and Threatening" and said that it's "doubtful Mv3 will do much for security."