The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has published an open letter to mark the 30th anniversary of the day — March 12,1989 — when he submitted his original proposal for an information management system that went on to underpin the birth of online services. The propos…
The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has published an open letter to mark the 30th anniversary of the day — March 12,1989 — when he submitted his original proposal for an information management system that went on to underpin the birth of online services.
The proposal, dubbed “vague but exciting” by his boss at the time, married hypertext with Internet TCP and domain name system ideas. Berners-Lee also had to design and build a web browser and put together the first web server. The first website was put up a couple of years later, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, where Berners-Lee had worked.
The rest, as they say, is Internet history.
Thirty years on from the free and open online information playground Berners-Lee had envisaged it’s fair to say today’s web isn’t quite the academic, egalitarian paradise he dreamt of.
In recent years Berners-Lee has made a series of public interventions, warning especially about corporate capture of the online sphere. He’s also working on new decentralization technologies to try to break the grip of dominant digital walled gardens.
The academic turned entrepreneur certainly cannot be accused of shying away from the societal challenges his invention now poses.
But his anniversary letter urges people not to give up on the web. “If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web,” he suggests.
The letter, which can be read in full here on the Web Foundation’s site, boils the problem of web misuse into three distinct categories:
“While the first category is impossible to eradicate completely, we can create both laws and code to minimize this behaviour, just as we have always done offline,” Berners-Lee continues, setting out an action plan for tackling disinformation and web misuse.
