I gave away the World Wide Web for free because I believed that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe this more than ever. Global regulation and governance are technically feasible, but they depend on political will. If we can pull it together, we have a chance to reclaim the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity, and empathy across cultural boundaries. We can empower individuals again and take the web back. It’s not too late.
By Tim BERNERS-LEE
I was 34 when I first came up with the idea for the World Wide Web. I took every opportunity to explain it: I presented it at meetings, I sketched it on a whiteboard for anyone who was interested, I even “drew” it in the snow with a ski pole to show a friend. I begged and pleaded with the leaders at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where I was working at the time. At first, they considered the idea “a bit eccentric,” but eventually they let me work on it. I was captivated by the idea of combining two already existing technologies: the Internet and hypertext, which gives life to an ordinary document by adding “links.”
I believed that giving users such a simple way to navigate the internet would unleash creativity and collaboration on a global scale. If you could put anything there, after a while, everything would be found.
But for the web to have everything, everyone had to be able to use it and want to use it. And that, in itself, was too much to ask. I couldn’t also ask that they pay for every search or download they made. For it to succeed, it had to be free. That’s why, in 1993, I convinced the leaders of CERN to donate the intellectual property rights to the World Wide Web, putting it in the public domain. We gave the web to everyone. Today, when I look at my invention, I’m forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a few large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial intermediaries or even oppressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that intentionally create addiction and damage the mental health of adolescents. Trading usage for personal data certainly doesn’t fit my vision of a free web.
On many platforms, we are no longer the customer, but the product. Our data, even when anonymized, is sold to actors we never intended, who can then target us with content and advertising. This includes intentionally harmful content that leads to real-world violence, spreads misinformation, destroys our psychological well-being, and aims to undermine social cohesion.
We have the technical capacity to return that power to the individual. Solid is an open, interoperable standard that my team and I developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Applications running on Solid don’t silently own your data—they have to ask you for it, and you decide whether to accept it or not. Your data stays in one place, under your control.
Smart sharing of information can liberate it. Why does your smartwatch write your biological data to a single place, in a single format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates, and Tweets stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you shouldn’t be able to see any of this? You generate this data. You should own it.
Somewhere between my initial vision of web 1.0 and the rise of social media to web 2.0, we took the wrong path. We now stand at a new crossroads, where we must decide whether AI will be used for the good or the bad of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First, we need to make sure that policymakers don’t end up playing the same decade-old game as they did with social media. The time to establish a governance model for AI was yesterday, so we need to act urgently. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or lawyer, bound by law, regulation, and codes of conduct. Why not adopt the same framework for AI?
How to move forward? Part of the frustration with democracy in the 21st century is that governments have been too slow to meet the demands of digital citizens. I programmed the World Wide Web on a single computer, in a small room at CERN. CERN was created after World War II by the UN and European governments, who identified a historical and scientific turning point that required international cooperation. It is hard to imagine a major technology company that would agree to share the World Wide Web without any commercial reward, as CERN allowed me to do. That is why we need a non-profit body, in the style of CERN, to push forward international research on AI.
I gave away the World Wide Web for free because I believed that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe this more than ever. Global regulation and governance are technically feasible, but they depend on political will. If we can pull it together, we have a chance to reclaim the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity, and empathy across cultural boundaries. We can empower individuals again and take the web back. It’s not too late.
