When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.
Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.
In Australia to promote his book, This is for Everyone, Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become – and how he and a community of collaborators can put the power of the web back into the hands of its users.
Berners-Lee describes his excitement in the earliest years of the web as “uncontainable”. Approaching 40 years on, a rebellion is brewing among himself and a community of like-minded activists and developers.
“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.
Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by “charlatans”.
And the “World Wide Web” mostly means HTML - “hypertext” documents which can be published on the internet, and which are regular documents but with embedded links to other documents (hyperlinks), and a vision to ultimately create the “semantic web” - human-readable text which can also be processed by computers.
To be exact, Tim Berners Lee invented the original HTML specification, the HTTP communication protocol, and a proof-of-concept browser that implements both of them. These three things were required - on top of TCP, IP, Ethernets, that already existed - to build the Web.
The original hypertext proposal was even more complex than what we ended up getting, connecting ideas both ways.