From 1992 through 1998, as a Silicon Valley beat reporter in San Francisco, I witnessed the birth of the World Wide Web. Three decades later, serendipity brings me to DWeb to report that  industrial necessity could be poised to give the outgunned forces of Web 3.0 a chance to reawaken the dormant democratic potential that is embedded in the wires and cables of the internet.

To contextualize, the internet had its genesis in a 1974 scientific article by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. That article defined the TCP/IP protocols – rules and specifications for sending data from points A to B to Wherever.

Those 50-year-old protocols created the digital equivalent of a conveyor belt that goes everywhere and never stops running. The network’s wires are imbued with the spirit of TCP/IP which gave them a simple task – if you get data that conforms to the protocols, send it where it is addressed. No questions asked.

What makes this democratic is that senders never need to ask for permission because none is ever necessary. They may have to beg a court for forgiveness if attacked by lawyers, or suffer who knows what consequences if they piss off a dictator, but those are not engineering issues.

But not much happened between 1974 and 1985, when the National Science Foundation funded a TCP/IP compliant high-speed testbed connecting supercomputer centers. The idea was to develop applications and techniques to make the net’s theoretical capabilities practical, an investment that would pay astronomical dividends.

First, however, network innovation had to cross the Alps to Switzerland, where Sir Tim Berners-Lee, working through the CERN research system, spearheaded development of the world wide web protocols and URL addressing system. These made it relatively easy to place digital objects on internet cables, where the TCP/IP protocols sent data to its destination at near light speed.

I arrived in Silicon Valley just as these network developments were converging with a parallel tech democratization from mainframe to personal computing.

This abstraction is brought to life in the 60-second Super Bown commercial Apple aired to herald the launch of the Macintosh. It shows an athlete with a sledgehammer running up to shatter the glass house wherein sits the mainframe that controls everything.

The PC revolution transformed modern life by creating the potential to smash the glass house of any industry susceptible to digitization which was every industry. And at the end of this potentially disruptive production pipeline sat a digital conveyor belt ready to deliver anything, anywhere, anytime, no questions asked. All the network needed was product.

I saw the missing link fall into place in 1993 with the emergence of a user-friendly web browser that offered point and click controls to navigate the World Wide Web.

Browser software brought the network that had no product together with the supply chain that had no market to the delight of consumers who wanted everything and more.

We live the results, so let me not belabor them but simply share a few kiss and tells from the tech beat that I ghosted it 1998 to take up with its Silicon Valley cousin, biotechnology, in 1999:

 … The day Tim Pozar, ponytail down to the small of his back, took me seriously when I asked to see the internet. He led me into an air-conditioned room where computers without screens sat mounted on racks, and showed me the wires and the blinking red lights;

… Interviewing Marc Andreessen after he spun the browser software he developed on NSFNet into a company which then had a few dozen engineers, four of whom were playing foosball. I saw a video camera in a glass tank trained on an iguana. What’s up?  Of course! Shoulda known. They were developing full motion video for the web and didn’t want to crash the protocode;

… Trying to find the devil in the details as the Clinton Administration handed NSFNet net to industry. I can’t say they sold out the democratic network because I didn’t get a yes or no answer the day I asked two administration point people: “Did you just kill common carriage?” That phrase was the muscle behind the government’s feeble efforts to reign in the railroads that had pioneered government-subsided capitalism more than a century earlier. In fairness, the railroads got a huge swath of the country. All Big Tech got was some intellectual property and a license on the future.

I quit the tech beat out of boredom and self-loathing rather than write dotcom IPO porn and tech bro stories. Besides, biotech had a Human Genome Race that was more important and exciting.

After leaving tech in 1998 I went through a roughly 15-year period during which I had no professional involvement in network technology.

That changed when I left journalism for PR in 1993 after Stanford Engineering hired me to do some of the most intellectually rewarding writing of my life. And I don’t just say that because I doubled my paycheck.

My eight year Stanford stint that ended in 2021 re-immersed me in semiconductors, network architecture, user interfaces, and related technologies, this time with a forward-looking spin.

Through various coincidences and serendipities, permanently unemployed and under-stimulated me became aware of DWeb camp the Friday before it commenced. On its opening day I discovered the rebel alliance and surviving Jedi seeking sanctuary from the Death FANG in the cathedral Redwoods while buzzing up a storm on all manner of projects to tap the latent democratic Force embedded in the network to usher in a decentralized Web 3.0.

Finally! A place to deliver smuggled out reports like those about “AI at the edge” semiconductor research that had already gone through several iterations, the goal being to bring chips to market that put functions now passing from earth to Cloud and back into inexpensive, energy-saving, and performance-friendly silicon.

Driving this and doubtless other efforts are an industrial imperative to get out ahead of safety, home invasion, and privacy 3.0 problems likely to arise from the next AI-driven expansion of electronics into every fracking market niche where it is not already present. 

Digital carjackings of autonomous vehicles with baby-on-board would be bad optics. Digitally toilet-papering or ransom-waring Internet of Things networks would have phones ringing off the hook in Congress. As for privacy, how about your showers live streaming on the dark web, and don’t even think about the kids’ rooms.

Once control returns to earth, proactive public pressure could enable open source forces to attach a probe to the business end of a pile driver for a peek into the black box. With visibility, and some interoperability requirements owing to the aforementioned and similar concerns, it becomes possible to imagine creating defensible markets where independent producers could offer parity, possibly advantages in performance and price, plus the warm and fuzzy feeling of opening the door to a familiar face for house calls.

Of course, corporate vendors will offer boa constrictor wraparound services, first year free lifetime contracts tied to the house deed, and tireless AI trouble lines with two options: “Press any key except zero to explain why you accepted our offer rather than use the local vendors your neighbors swear by. Press zero if you’d like to stay on the line for a brief customer satisfaction survey.”

Silly? Yes. But a potential re-democratization to hardware seems likely to be on the short-term horizon. What would it take and look like to be proactive? It seems worthwhile to consider because third time’s the charm, and who knows when a fourth will be forthcoming.