Tim Berners-Lee makes a case for reclaiming the web's original ideals

Why the inventor of the internet is building a new web - and why he believes today's internet is not what he intended it to be

This Is for Everyone: The Captivating Memoir from the Inventor of the World Wide Web

by Tim Berners-Lee

Published by Macmillan

383 pages ₹899

  The internet is so woven into the fabric of our daily lives that it doesn’t feel like a choice anymore. It is, at this point, a condition of existence. But who built this? What was it built for? What were its principles? And was it always supposed to lead us down this addictive, algorithmic hellhole? 

There are technologies we adopt, and then there are technologies that adopt us; the World Wide Web belongs to that second category. In 1989, while working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a decentralised, open system for sharing information across incompatible computers — creating the World Wide Web. In This Is For Everyone, he tells his story — part memoir, part history, part manifesto. He returns to the founding vision of the web, where it came from, what it was designed to do, how it grew beyond anyone’s imagination, and how it has become something he never intended it to be. 

Mr Berners-Lee, the son of mathematicians who worked on the UK’s first commercial computer, would build makeshift computers from factory-reject transistors as a child, and by the time he joined CERN, the ethos of innovation was deep-set in his bones. At the organisation, he found abundant chaos, with dozens of incompatible computer systems, each operating in isolation. His solution was to combine hypertext with the internet to create a system with no centre, no hierarchy. “The web offered a new frontier,” he writes. “It was like giving everyone their own printing press, everyone their own radio transmitter, everyone their own television station, all with no oversight, all at once.” In 1993, he convinced CERN to release the web’s source code into the public domain, royalty-free. That single act of refusal to profit is what made the web what it is today: Universal. 

The web Mr Berners-Lee invented was meant to resist centralisation, but the result was inadvertently an oligopoly. He notes how “the algorithms that organized and presented content on [social media] services prioritized engagement over enjoyment, collaboration or mental health, and soon the fun was gone, replaced by the signature act of ‘doomscrolling’ through endless streams of invective, propaganda, negative news, conspiracy theory and envy-inducing lifestyle bait that preyed on the user’s fear of missing out”. 

A handful of tech giants such as Google and Meta captured the majority of traffic and attention. And attention, it turned out, was the currency that would change everything. The business model that would eventually dominate the web — targeted advertising through constant surveillance — required platforms to hold their users for as long as possible, by whatever means available. Those means would be the systematic exploitation of human psychology: Outrage, envy, fear, anxiety. “The online world in which we now operate,” Mr Berners-Lee writes, is “one guided not by our intentions but by what grabs our attention, like an outrageous headline or a funny meme”. Cambridge Analytica epitomised this new world, where personal data, at every step, is treated as a corporate asset; 87 million Facebook users’ data was harvested without their consent and used to micro-target political messaging. 

But can there be another world? And what does a better web even look like? Mr Berners-Lee is trying to build one. Solid — the open-source protocol he is developing — gives users Personal Online Data Stores, or pods, with their entire digital footprint. Health records, financial data, travelling activity, social connections — everything is held at the individual level, shared only with explicit permission, revocable at will. “Imagine if your lawyer auctioned off your legal documents to the highest bidder! Online, we do this every day,” he writes. The shift he imagines is from an attention economy, where platforms profit from holding your gaze, to an intention economy, where digital tools serve your goals. A patient could share their medical history with a new doctor and revoke that access the moment the appointment ends. A user could switch social platforms without losing their history, their identity. 

The web has become, as Mr Berners-Lee puts it, “a public square, a library, a doctor’s office, a shop, a school, a design studio, an office, a cinema, a bank, and so much more” — making  the question of who controls it all the more critical for it’s a civilisational question. 

 This Is For Everyone asks us to fight for something, to recognise that the web’s founding principles were more than naive idealism; they were a workable alternative to what we have now. The distance between what the web is and what it was built to be is not inevitable. 

It is a choice, made and remade every day, by governments, corporations, developers and citizens. The web, Mr Berners-Lee insists, belongs to everyone. 

Not to platforms, not to advertisers, not to governments. Reclaiming the web is a political issue, a social issue, a moral issue. Simply put, reclaiming the web is a civilisational issue.

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The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor. @aroomofwords