He Invented the Web 28 Years Ago to Break Up Control of Information. The Web Became a New Tool of Control | A Curious Person

Turing Award winner Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, and the 28-year rise and fall of the web he built.

Yesterday, Tim Berners-Lee won the Turing Award.

The surprising thing about him winning computing's Nobel Prize is how long it took.

In 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, and every website that starts with WWW came after that. In 1991 he built the first graphical web browser. In 1994 he settled the standard for hyperlinks, and only then did moving between web pages and between pieces of information become as fast and direct as stepping through a door that opens anywhere, with no boundaries in between.

The internet economy is also a story that begins after Berners-Lee laid the web's foundations. In 1995 a young Jeff Bezos put a bookstore on the web; that same year an English teacher named Jack Ma built a website called China Pages. Today Bezos's Amazon is worth $430 billion and Ma's Alibaba is worth $260 billion.

Google, Baidu, Alibaba, Amazon, Facebook, your personal blog — every internet service we use today sits on top of Tim Berners-Lee's work.

Yet his is the one name that appears on no rich list. After he created the web he filed no patent, made no real attempt to sell it, and went on working as an information scientist. His two largest payouts were the Millennium Technology Prize from Finland, worth 1 million euros, and the Turing Award he won yesterday, worth $1 million.

He is not a quiet man. Over the years, besides writing research papers at universities, he has stayed on the front line of public argument, pressing governments and tech companies to take open data and net neutrality seriously, and joining an AMA on Reddit to talk with younger users.

He probably does it out of worry.

"When I was looking for a name for the 'World Wide Web,' the element I wanted to stress was that it was decentralized — that anything could link to anything."

The web is nothing like that now. Just today Tencent became the tenth most valuable company in the world, at $279 billion. And WeChat, the star product behind that success, has already turned the web into a closed super-app with no outbound hyperlinks at all, one that has taken over the daily lives of 800 million users.

Silicon Valley, which has always called itself liberal, is no better. Mark Zuckerberg laid down free internet access in India and Africa, but the people using it could reach only Facebook and its partners.

Closed, centralized control of information is exactly what Tim Berners-Lee invented the web 28 years ago to prevent.

The Web Started Out as a Way to Remove Central Control Over Information

The idea at the heart of the web, the hyperlink, began with a frustration Tim Berners-Lee felt at work.

In 1985 he was working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Personal computer sales were peaking: IBM had sold more than 4 million PCs, Atari was still making computers, and Steve Jobs's Apple had been selling the Macintosh for less than a year since the "1984" ad ran.

The problem was that there were many brands of computer, and their operating systems and even their data formats all differed. Researchers came to CERN from all over the world, and passing work documents and data to each other was a great nuisance. As a software engineer, Berners-Lee often had to write export software for one machine after another just to get data off a hard disk, and it wore him down.

"That frustration was exactly what showed the project's potential. All those disks were full of files, and if you could imagine them as part of one big virtual filing system in the sky, life would be a lot simpler."

The answer he arrived at was hypertext. The concept was not his. The computer scientist Ted Nelson coined the word in the 1950s; his idea was information that a human could read, linked together, with nothing restricting it in between.

Networks of connected computers already existed, but they were too hard to use. In the late 1980s this is how someone got online: you first had to know which server, which site, you wanted; you ran a program called Telnet on your computer; you typed in a string of numbers and dots standing for the server; you entered a username and password to prove who you were; then you typed commands for the remote machine to run, digging down layer by layer to find anything. Outside academic and research institutions, the internet was nowhere near a tool the public wanted:

Click a "link" with the mouse and you could jump anywhere on the internet, just like Doraemon's Anywhere Door. Berners-Lee did not create the internet, but he is the man who gave it life.

In his vision, the data and material on the internet should not sit in the layered, tree-shaped structure described above. It should rest on an open protocol, with no center, no single server doing the distributing, and every piece of information linked to every other on equal terms.

In 1989 he wrote a report for his boss at the time, Mike Sendall, proposing a protocol for linking information and doing work faster. Documents and other kinds of resources made up web pages, and web pages made up websites. Every site had its own unique address, easy to save and to reach, and that address is what we now call a URL — a URI back then.

He also used the tree-shaped management hierarchy of CERN, where he worked, as a picture of how people got information on the internet at the time, to show how "decentralized" links between information would speed things up:

Decentralization was the most important rule in the original document Berners-Lee wrote for the web:

"Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination."

Berners-Lee believed information was equal, and that the web could help people organize the knowledge they had and hand them things they did not know. Even the choice of the name World Wide Web came from that:

"When I was looking for a name for a global hypertext system, the element I wanted to stress was that it was decentralized — that anything could link to anything. Mathematically that shape is a web, and it works globally."

On August 6, 1991, eighteen months after Berners-Lee handed in his proposal, the world's first website went up. It was very simple, and this was its URL: http://info.cern.ch

The site still says "the world's first website" today.

At Christmas 1991 Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb, a graphical browser: put a URL in the address bar, click "find," and the site's information came back. He already believed then that the web would change how people connected to the internet to get information, but he never imagined the web he built with his own hands would become the most important economic center of the next 20 years.

Companies Brought the Web to Everyone

Between 1991 and 1994, traffic to info.cern.ch, the first website Berners-Lee built, multiplied a hundredfold. The credit does not belong to him.

For a while, in fact, nobody rated his web project. After he handed CERN his report in 1989, he waited eighteen months before his boss, Mike Sendall, agreed to let him work on the web as a small side project outside his job. He tried to get companies to write a good browser for the web, one that could lay out images and text, and nobody answered. Europe's hypertext research community — the Hypertext conference, for one — even rejected a paper he submitted.

Nothing changed until 1992.

Marc Andreessen, a student at the University of Illinois, wrote Mosaic, a browser built on the web protocol. The interface was clean, pages had a wide display area, and it could loop animated GIFs. It turned "browsing the web" into something interesting that ordinary people could understand.

Andreessen had other network protocols to choose from besides the web — Gopher, from the University of Minnesota, for instance. But Gopher charged for its site protocol and was not as open as the web, so the browsers that followed — Mosaic, Firefox, Internet Explorer — were all built on the web's protocol.

Berners-Lee refused to fence it off, and did not think he should collect patent fees or access fees for the web.

"If the web had been a technology patent in my hands, entirely under my control, it probably would never have taken off. Making the web an open system was crucial to it becoming universal later. You can't plan to build a space as big as the universe and keep control of it at the same time."

After Mosaic came out it caught fire alongside the web. Only once the web and web browsers existed did personal computer hardware find real mass demand.

In 1994 Andreessen and his friend Jim Clark founded Mosaic Communications and raised money. Because that infringed the University of Illinois's trademark on the name Mosaic, the company renamed itself Netscape in November 1994.

What came next you can find in almost any history of internet business:

Netscape drew plenty of attention selling a paid browser and went public on Nasdaq less than a year after it was founded, the first internet company to do so. By 1995 it held 70% of the browser market. Then Bill Gates's Internet Explorer entered, and the "browser wars" with Netscape began. In 1998, by giving its browser away, bundling it with Windows, and signing exclusivity deals for IE with PC makers, Microsoft finally beat Netscape, which was bought by AOL for $4.2 billion.

In the middle of that boom, Berners-Lee considered starting a company called Websoft to build a browser. He gave the idea up quickly. He feared it would set off fierce competition, produce browsers that could not work with each other, and in the end split the web into rival camps, the way things had been before the web existed.

The bubble came faster than the split did. Between 1999 and 2000, more than 200 companies went public in a single year, as many as all the IPOs from 2001 through 2007 put together. In 2001 the American internet bubble burst, and 52% of those companies went under within two or three years.

While Marc Andreessen got rich and drove his Mercedes to interviews with mainstream magazines, Berners-Lee, who rarely made a magazine cover, still drove his Volkswagen Golf to meetings of the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. He is still active at that nonprofit, founded in 1994, which works to unify the standards for hypertext editors and wants more people to use what is on the web for free.

The companies that survived the dot-com bubble cared more about how efficiently they could make money on the web.

Yahoo and the portals invented the internet's revenue model: pay people to collect and sort information from around the internet, pile it up as hyperlinks to draw users, then charge advertisers. That is still how most news and information sites make their money.

Google's business was to send machines out to find every web page in the world and to link and rank what they found, a system called PageRank, named after co-founder Larry Page. Five years later it was the largest internet advertising company in the world.

The number of internet users climbed fast, pushed along by these companies. By 2016, the web's 27th year, more than 30% of the world's population was living inside the rules Berners-Lee first drew up.

The Companies That Spread the Web Brought Central Control Back

Since the web's standards were set, Berners-Lee's work over the past decade has centered on net neutrality and on connecting data up. At a TED conference in 2009 he said that although people could now get information freely on the internet, the various social networking sites had built high walls of information between them, walls that did not talk to each other and that had to be knocked down again.

"The next step for the networked world is linked data. We have already worked with governments to open up some data that matters to society, and I think that is a good start," he said then, and he sounded confident.

Things then ran a little out of control.

Driven by commercial interest, in the networked world after 2010 few people were still thinking about how to give users fairer access to information. Companies, founders, investors — what they thought about was how to pen more users in and make it harder for them to leave. Decentralization, the value the web was founded on, was hardly mentioned.

On mobile, cut up into "apps," the sense of enclosure grew sharper still.

In China all of this happened earlier. The new network businesses — social networking in 2010, mobile internet startups in 2012, O2O in 2014, bike-sharing now — were underneath it all a game of Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu blocking each other and burning cash to tear each other apart.

To keep traffic from leaking out and to protect their own products, they stopped caring about the web's earliest rules. Not letting users click a link, or making you copy a few hundred characters to open something on Taobao, costs them nothing. WeChat, with no hyperlinks and no way out of the app, would have you living inside its product from morning to night if it could.

More frightening, perhaps, is that internet users have gone from hunting for information themselves in the early days to waiting to be handed it, because information services have become so convenient.

Facebook has begun to take over what news 1.5 billion people around the world see each day, and which content is "better" than other content.

A dictator once needed layer upon layer of propaganda departments to police what people saw. Now a few thousand engineers can control everything. And Zuckerberg answers to no one: he holds a majority of Facebook's voting power by himself, and no shareholder can challenge him. It is hard to say whether Trump or Zuckerberg has more power.

China's situation is more complicated, but you can hear the same defense — that "technology is neutral" — while watching the flow of information get more tightly controlled.

Four of the ten most valuable companies in the world today were born out of businesses started on the web: Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and Tencent. The companies that make money on the web still care about numbers — user growth, daily active users, market value after listing. The more addicted users are to the product, the better.

Berners-Lee is deeply worried. Not long ago he wrote an open letter, one more attempt to fix what has gone wrong with the web. Now 61, he wants a five-year plan to fight fake news and save the web:

"Cooperation between tech companies and governments will increase surveillance of what people do online, and they could also trample our right to privacy with extreme regulation… For their own profit, tech companies prod us into clicking certain links. They do it with huge amounts of data, fitted to our tastes. That is what has let fake news that stirs up emotion spread everywhere."

Berners-Lee uses technology the same way he did 28 years ago. You can see it in an answer he gave during that AMA on Reddit.

Someone asked him what he liked most, outside the internet.

His answer: "People."

Cover image source: Wikipedia