The Underweb

Development of new features and improvements to the WWW come by way of a precarious competition between browser vendors and ad-hoc interactions among the semi-closed boards of standards committees. Because all browser vendors provide their browsers to users at zero financial cost, and the growing majority of browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) are free software, the kind of competition amongst vendors can now safely be viewed as artificial and antithetical to the inherent ideals of a universal framework for networked communication. The creative and critical research presented in this paper examines the problem space this contention creates and offers partial solutions in the form of a new free software browser prototype, called the Underweb. The Underweb provides developers and users with potentially more user-elegant technologies, including the ability to not only read, but also to write, edit and publish in a global communication system without private third-party involvement.