Annals of Technology
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It
In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again.
By Julian Lucas
September 29, 2025
.....Fragmentation menaced the web from the outset. From CERN, it spread quickly through listservs, where enthusiasts shared proto-browsers to replace the bare-bones command-line program Berners-Lee had written. This was the kind of improvisation he’d hoped for. But it quickly got out of hand.
One day, Berners-Lee had a listserv exchange with a college student named Marc Andreessen, who’d proposed an “<img>” tag to embed pictures in pages. Berners-Lee demurred, saying that he preferred more content-neutral syntax. But Andreessen wasn’t asking for his blessing. In 1993, he led the team that launched Mosaic, the first modern browser. The next year, he released a commercial successor, Netscape, whose I.P.O. made him an instant multimillionaire. Time put him on its cover—barefoot, leering, perched on a throne—and hailed him as a “Golden Geek.” (Time profiled Berners-Lee the next year, noting that unlike Andreessen, who drove a Mercedes, Berners-Lee drove an old Volkswagen; he jokingly blamed its carbon-monoxide emissions for the “diffuseness of his answers.”) Berners-Lee believed that Andreessen was trying to “hijack” his creation.
His pique wasn’t just about money or ego. The web was meant to be universal, and had already outpaced similar networks. Kahle, the Internet Archive founder, had created WAIS, or the Wide Area Information Server, a publishing system with natural-language search. Another competitor was Gopher, developed at the University of Minnesota. Yet both relied on existing file formats and hierarchical menus. When Gopher tried to charge licensing fees, users fled. The web, by contrast, was free, easy to use, and, thanks to hypertext, infinitely flexible. “The markup language was simple,” Dan Connolly, who worked with Berners-Lee to codify HTML, told me. “And you didn’t have to ask your boss for money.”
To keep it that way, Berners-Lee moved to the U.S. and founded W3C, in 1994. In time, the organization...
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