Sir Tim's wondrous wired world and the mission to set the web right

Minutes before the celebrated inventor of the World Wide Web joined me for lunch, I asked ChatGPT, “Is Sir Tim Berners-Lee a foodie?” In its now-famous humourless tone, the world’s favourite AI assistant responded, “There is no evidence that Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a foodie.” 

When I told the British computer scientist and physicist about this brief interaction, he grinned, “Yes, but he is known to enjoy good food!” This is going to be a cracker of a lunch, I thought. 

It had taken me more than two months to fix the lunch and a day to pinpoint a restaurant that would suit Berners-Lee, whose movements were being coordinated by his chief of staff. One funky place I was recommended was too far from his hotel, another too crowded. I finally settled on the Jaipur Pavilion at ITC Rajputana. I did a recce the day before to make sure the spices were mild enough for non-Rajasthanis. They were.  

Berners-Lee was in Jaipur to speak about his memoir, This Is For Everyone, at the literary festival that unfolds in the Pink City every year. The book is a passionate account — passionate, for a taciturn, soft-spoken scientist — of his journey from childhood to inventing the web, as we have come to call it now, to the inevitable struggle to set right a totally wired world beset by social media abuse. 

Having invented the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee insisted that it be made free for anyone to access, thus denying himself, according to some accounts, a life of almost unimaginable material wealth. There can be little dispute, though, about the revolution his invention unleashed in nearly every aspect of human life — according to one widely cited figure (compiled by Data Reportal), 5.56 billion people have access to the World Wide Web. 

ChatGPT’s pronouncement on whether or not Sir Tim is a foodie was made possible by his March 12, 1989 invention, created while he was working at CERN, or the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, on the French-Swiss border near Geneva. How did this invention come about, I asked. How was he ahead of the curve? Was it an accident of history? 

“I was lucky,” replied Berners-Lee immediately and matter of factly. Several things came together at around the same time to make this possible, he said, chiefly the wide availability of transistors. Although both his parents were early computer scientists and mathematicians who knew Alan Turing, the iconic wartime codebreaker and godfather of computer science, “they never had transistors”.  

“There was a time when, suddenly, electronics happened… My parents had to use valves. And I could do things with transistors, which were small and cheap, and you could buy thousands of them. They helped build the first computer; I built my own computer.”  

So in a single generation, the computer changed from being “this huge thing in a tin hut to something that you can build yourself — and have fun.” 

Around the world, there was an air of creative freedom. Geeks could work away at their obsessions, burrowed away in garages, college labs and, yes, tin sheds, inventing unlikely stuff, away from the shadow of Big Business, and maybe make their billions in the process. As Berners-Lee pointed out, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and he were all born in the same year — 1955. But the similarity ends there: Berners-Lee, taking the road less travelled, persuaded CERN to keep the technology behind the World Wide Web (HTML and HTTP) public and free. 

And so it is that we (the 5.56 billion) can click away on the internet and surf the world of web every day of the year, without really having to pay anyone, other than the service provider and the power company.  

Decades earlier, the world of science suffused the world of young Tim. He remembers a book titled Enquire Within Upon Everything, a handbook of practical matters, in his childhood home in East Sheen, London. And there’s the delightful story of his mother, both a devout Christian and a scientist, thinking all churches should have the words “Everything within should be taken metaphorically” emblazoned above the entry.  

In the same spirit of enquiry, 23 years after Berners-Lee’s invention, scientists and engineers at CERN found evidence of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle in the standard model of particle physics theorised by the physicists Peter Higgs and Satyendra Nath Bose (boson is possibly the only common noun in the English language named after an Indian).  

With the Higgs boson now earning the nickname ‘God particle’ and the CERN link, I had to ask whether Berners-Lee believed in God.  

“I’m an atheist, but spiritual,” he replied. He is, however, attracted to the Unitarian Universalist church, an inclusive non-creedal movement that embraces atheists (and everybody else), with a focus on “deeds, not creeds.” “They have rituals, they have candles of concern, they have hymns, but the words are changed to remove references to God as being male.”  

He said he loves hymns — something I noted he shares with another famous British scientist and atheist, the biologist Richard Dawkins (later he spoke of another musical love — the songs of Simon and Garfunkel). 

Of course, it made sense: A self-effacing, path-breaking inventor wedded to the notion of public good could not be anything but a universalist.  

At this point, the server came up to take our orders. Berners-Lee, who is allergic to crustaceans, opted for a traditional non-vegetarian Rajasthani thaali. He didn’t need much persuasion — he is a lover of good food, it became clear.  For drinks, he settled for a glass of buttermilk (chaach) that came with the thaali, dismissing offers of a beer.   

“I like spice but not very strong — is it unusual to do it mild?” he asked considerately. Not at all, the server assured him, and kept to her word. 

The decorated Rajasthani thaali can appear enormous at first look. It has everything: The iconic dal-bati-churma as starters, followed by gatta kari, aaloo-pyaz, lal maas, Jodhpuri chicken, raita, ras malai and chaach, with missi roti (a mixture of whole wheat flour and besan).  

Berners-Lee, after a quick how-to guide by the server, expertly smashed the bati (small dough balls) with his spoon and poured the yellow dal and churma, which, taken together, make for a distinctive sweet-savoury mix.  

We returned to the theme of the process of inventing the World Wide Web. Was he aware of the historic importance of the project he was undertaking? Berners-Lee did not directly answer that, once again pointing instead at a play of factors. 

“Well, we were at a very exciting time. So the internet was just becoming available in Europe. It was basically frowned upon in Europe because they wanted to develop their own networking protocols,” he said. “But it worked and had been tried out in the US for 20 years, so the internet was invented 20 years before the web. I realised the possibility of the internet to make the web.”  

Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web was competing for people’s attention. His main competition was Gopher, a campus-wide information system developed by Mark McCahill and Farhad Anklesaria at the University of Minnesota. 

But Gopher hit a roadblock when the University of Minnesota sought to reserve the right to charge licensees to use it. This was “very, very influential” in Berners-Lee’s resolve to make the World Wide Web free.  

But there was a “battle within CERN”, and Berners-Lee faced pushback. “People who had vision realised that giving it for free was important,” he said. Equally, “some people felt maybe they should get some money back in some way” — these were people “whose vision was limited”. But even his former opponents realise now, he said, that “it couldn’t have been done otherwise”. 

His instincts were right: If it was going to be for everyone, the web had to be free. The internet by this time was widely available across the US, and “the result (of making it free) was that the web spread immediately across America”. 

And so in 1994, Berners-Lee moved to the US, where he continued his work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founding the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The consortium is the main international organisation that develops open source standards and guidelines for the World Wide Web. 

“People got the impression that the web got up and left when I went to America,” Berners-Lee laughed. But, of course, he had ensured that it was free of any revenue stream chains. 

“Being in America was important, because that’s where the centre of gravity of the internet was. MIT was a very good shepherd.” 

Berners-Lee spoke slowly but with infectious enthusiasm about the early years of the web, and I was left with the impression that the invention and its subsequent development came out of two seemingly opposing dynamics — of competition and collaboration. 

“Yes, and it may be the same person,” Berners-Lee agreed. “So the people who work at the consortium, they are competition, but they know they have to work together, get people around the table, who are producing one document about how the web should work… about HTML or something,” he explained. “And then the people designing that document know it has to be really good. They want to have all their ideas in it, typically, but they have to settle on one do­cument, so they can’t put ev­e­r­ybody’s ideas. So you have to end up with compromises. You have to collaborate.” 

And what kind of ecosystem encourages such invention? “Invention comes, I think, when people are up to being curious. Curiosity drives invention. My parents brought me up to be curious,” Berners-Lee said, rapidly this time. He mentioned “imagination” as another ingredient. 

Social change and technological change, Berners-Lee said, happen in tandem. Recent history proves him right — the Arab Spring, for instance. The internet blackout enforced by the Iranian regime, beset by nationwide protests, is another case in point.  

Yet, technology itself is value-neutral, experts say. It can work either way.  

Berners-Lee’s work isn’t done yet — not by a long shot. The World Wide Web is now ubiquitous and omnipresent, a bit like the God Particle that physicists theorised and CERN found. A majority of the world population now uses the web, most of them every day. Yet, it is far from the promise of a linked world working for human progress. Tranches of social media have now been hijacked to spew online hate, never more so than against women, while concerns over data privacy mount. Did he, I wondered to myself, feel responsible?   

The British inventor, acutely aware of the social media storm, is working with other computer scientists and students across the world to make the web safe. One platform he has developed is called Solid, which stands for Social Linked Data protocol. It would allow ordinary users to decide if and with whom they want to share their data. It’s a platform that he would like to see introduced in India as a project. Another project is a friendly, personalised AI assistant he calls Charlie, who (or which) will only work for you, not for Big Business or advertisers. 

Our meal was coming to an end, and Berners-Lee had just reached out for the bowl of ras malai, confessing to a sweet tooth. What better time than now to ask the 70-year-old about his legacy. How would Berners-Lee like to be remembered? The inventor took some time to consider the question, while his wife, Rosemary, who had joined us by now, watched keenly.  

“I’d like the Solid revolution to be my thing, and to be remembered as the person who persevered through — from starting the web to finishing where it really serves humanity, serves individual humans... through data sovereignty.”  

Did he enjoy the meal? Her husband, Rosemary pointed out, had pretty much polished off the entire Rajasthani thaali.  

As I walked out of the restaurant I couldn’t help but wonder what the reticent English physicist thought of the hustle and bustle of an Indian literary festival. He may not be a prophet, but I had so many more questions to ask about our common, connected future.