The Web That Might Have Been...

Tired of all the advertising and marketing messages you need to wade through every time you try to navigate somewhere online?

The Web didn’t have to develop this way. It was almost different.

In 1965 Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext” to connote his plan for using computer programming to link written documents together. The concept of creating hypertext links between concepts was not unprecedented, even before computers. Footnotes in academic papers are a form of hypertext, for example. And the Talmud, which has blocks of commentary arranged in concentric rectangles, represents a kind of hypertext.

But Nelson had a vision for using computer programs to do the linking. With an assortment of young hacker friends, Nelson began working on a project he called Xanadu, with the goal of linking up and cross-referencing all the information in the world. Despite two decades of on-and-off effort, however, Xanadu never got off the ground, a story chronicled in a comprehensive 1995 Wired Magazine article, “The Curse of Xanadu.”

When the first web browsers were invented in the early 1990s they relied on hypertext links to connect information in one computer to information in another. But unlike the links Nelson had worked on for Xanadu, the hypertext links that created the Worldwide Web were one-way in nature, rather than two-way. That is, on the Web anyone could point to anything, while the Xanadu project was based on requiring a link back from the entity being pointed to, as well.

Had the Worldwide Web been based on two-way links, it would have required considerably more processing power, which in the 1990s would have hindered its growth. But it would have resulted in an entirely different business model for the network.

As it is, the only way a publisher can make money online is either by imposing a time-consuming and costly credit-card-based charging mechanism, or by selling advertising. But if hypertext links had required two-way interaction, then a completely different system might have evolved.  

As Walter Isaacson said in his book The Innovators, “Had Nelson’s system of two-way links prevailed, it would have been possible to meter the use of links and allow small automatic payments to accrue to those who produced the content that was used. The entire business of publishing and journalism and blogging would have turned out differently.”

For instance, imagine that to access the Web a user was required to provide an initial credit card deposit, against which micropayments could be charged by publishers of original content. Instead of having to endure a series of pop-up ads just to read a magazine article online, your account would simply be charged a few pennies for accessing the article, or maybe a few tenths of a penny. A popular blogger might charge something, too. No additional sign-up necessary, and little or no advertising, either. Go to a site and choose whether to pay 3￠ to access an article without any ads, or pick it up for free, with advertising – in the same way many smartphone apps are sold today.

The point is that had the Web been designed from the beginning based on two-way hypertext linking, rather than just one-way linking, a range of different for-pay business models would have evolved, and the entire structure of the publishing business might have turned out differently.