Tim Berners-Lee is the genius behind the World Wide Web, having developed while working at CERN in Switzerland. With April 30th signalling the 15th anniversary of the day CERN put the Web in to the public domain, Berners-Lee has spoken about the past, present and future on the Internet.

The Web has many birthdays, one of which is the day in March 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee handed his boss at CERN a document titled Information Management: a Proposal. Another is today, April 30th, when the Web was given over to the public in a move which has enabled it to become the huge global free-for-all that we all know and love.

The BBC spoke to Berners-Lee on this anniversary, and asked him his views on how the Web came to exist, where he sees it in the big scheme of things, and what the future may hold.

He started by describing the Web as “still in its infancy”, and explaining how he thinks the Web of the future will put “all the data in the world [at the fingertips of every user]“.

“The web has been a tremendous tool for people to do a lot of good even though you can find bad stuff out there.”

“The experience of the development of the web by so many people collaborating across the globe has just been a fantastic experience,”

“The experience of international collaboration continues. Also the spirit that really we have only started to explore the possibilities of [the web], that continues.”

Without mentioning it by name, Berners-Lee also spoke of The Semantic Web, and how in the future, the Internet may prove to be used in ways we cannot imagine at the moment.

“What’s exciting is that people are building new social systems, new systems of review, new systems of governance.”

“My hope is that those will produce… new ways of working together effectively and fairly which we can use globally to manage ourselves as a planet.”

The fact that today is the anniversary of the day CERN handed the Web over to the public domain for free also brings up the question of how that happened, and how different life could have been if a royalty or price had instead been imposed.

Robert Cailliau, who worked alongside Berners-Lee at CERN, explained:

“The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the web was going to be. We had to convince them [the directors] that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore Cern couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away.”

“We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favour of that.”

“If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.

“We would have had some sort of market share alongside services like AOL and Compuserve, but we would not have flattened the world.”

The Web is still young, and has so much more to give. This seems to be a time to realise how far the concept has come, and how much more it could yet become. If Berners-Lee is to believed, and I think I trust him, then it could change the world in ways we haven’t dreamt.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 2:54 pm under Internet, Opinion, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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