Global Institutions and the Web

In today’s BBC article Luminaries Look to the Future Web, Robert Cailliau sees the imminent need for new global institutions: “Since the web is totally worldwide we need a set of behavioural rules, laws they are commonly called, that are accepted worldwide.” About the Semantic Web, he says “I don’t know who is controlling it. And, because it works by ontologies, who decides on what basis I am going to see things?”

Cailliau works at CERN and helped Tim Berners-Lee with the original web development. His cautionary words provide a nice contrast to some of the futures envisioned by other luminaries in the BBC article.