File:Beginning of WWW 89 TimBerners-Lee CERN.jpg

Origins 1989

Established by World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, "devoted to all people having access to the Web" ...

Visit WebFoundation.org

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Update 2023

May 2023 / Via NPR

Almost everything which you needed to know in your daily life was written down somewhere," Berners-Lee told NPR's Fresh Air in 1996. "And at the time, in the 1980s, it was almost certainly written down on a computer somewhere. It was very frustrating that people's effort in typing it in was not being used when, in fact, if it could only be tied together and made accessible, everything would be so much easier for everybody."

CERN owned Berners-Lee's invention, and the lab had the option to license out the World Wide Web for profit. But Berners-Lee believed that keeping the web as open as possible would help it grow.

"The web setting out as something which was universal, something which anybody could use, I felt was very important," he said. "It's no good having something which will run on any platform if, in fact, there is a proprietary hold on it."

Berners-Lee eventually convinced CERN to release the World Wide Web into the public domain without any patents or fees. He has since attributed the runaway success of the web to that single decision.

Update 2018

“I Was Devastated”

Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the world wide web has some regrets

August 2018 / Via Vanity Fair

“For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence. With an Oxonian wisp of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee appears the consummate academic—communicating rapidly, in a clipped London accent, occasionally skipping over words and eliding sentences as he stammers to convey a thought. His soliloquy was a mixture of excitement with traces of melancholy. Nearly three decades earlier, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. On this morning, he had come to Washington as part of his mission to save it.

At 63, Berners-Lee has thus far had a career more or less divided into two phases. In the first, he attended Oxford; worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN); and then, in 1989, came up with the idea that eventually became the Web. Initially, Berners-Lee’s innovation was intended to help scientists share data across a then obscure platform called the Internet, a version of which the U.S. government had been using since the 1960s. But owing to his decision to release the source code for free—to make the Web an open and democratic platform for all—his brainchild quickly took on a life of its own. Berners-Lee’s life changed irrevocably, too. He would be named one of the 20th century’s most important figures by Time, receive the Turing Award (named after the famed code breaker) for achievements in the computer sciences, and be honored at the Olympics. He has been knighted by the Queen. “He is the Martin Luther King of our new digital world,” says Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. (Berners-Lee sits on the foundation’s board of trustees.)

Berners-Lee, who never directly profited off his invention, has also spent most of his life trying to guard it. While Silicon Valley started ride-share apps and social-media networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. From the beginning, in fact, Berners-Lee understood how the epic power of the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies. He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation. His prophecy came to life, most recently, when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign. This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice.

For the man who set all this in motion, the mushroom cloud was unfolding before his very eyes. “I was devastated,” Berners-Lee told me that morning in Washington, blocks from the White House. For a brief moment, as he recalled his reaction to the Web’s recent abuses, Berners-Lee quieted; he was virtually sorrowful. “Actually, physically—my mind and body were in a different state.” Then he went on to recount, at a staccato pace, and in elliptical passages, the pain in watching his creation so distorted...

More @

• https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/the-man-who-created-the-world-wide-web-has-some-regrets

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Digital_Rights

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Tim Berners-Lee: governments are 'trampling on our rights to privacy'

There are three big threats to the world wide web as it currently exists – sharing personal data, misinformation, and political advertising.

That's according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the web, who has written an open letter to mark the anniversary of his creation. Twenty-eight years ago today, March 12, 1989, Berners-Lee set out his initial idea for the system that became the web. Since then he has witnessed the introduction of smartphones, creation of social media, and a wider ability for people to connect.

In the open letter, Berners-Lee says he has become "increasingly worried" in the past year and says there should be a "fight against government overreach in surveillance laws".

"I imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries," the founding director of the World Wide Web Foundation writes. "In many ways, the web has lived up to this vision, though it has been a recurring battle to keep it open."

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360-eOS#Digital_Citizens.2C_Digital_Rights_Movement

• http://www.wired.co.uk/article/tim-berners-lee-web-internet-letter-danger

• http://webfoundation.org/2017/03/web-turns-28-letter

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