this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.

Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.

In Australia to promote his book, This is for Everyone, Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become – and how he and a community of collaborators can put the power of the web back into the hands of its users.

Berners-Lee describes his excitement in the earliest years of the web as “uncontainable”. Approaching 40 years on, a rebellion is brewing among himself and a community of like-minded activists and developers.

“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.

Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by “charlatans”.

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[–] darkpanda@lemmy.ca 88 points 20 hours ago (4 children)

They kind of fix this in the lede, but dude did not invent the internet, he invented the World Wide Web. The internet is a superset of a whole bunch of things that includes the World Wide Web, but dude wasn’t out there inventing TCP/IP and routers and whatnot.

[–] LittleBorat3@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago

People say wifi when they mean the Internet, somehow one cannot expect accuracy. Articles always get written by professional clueless people also.

[–] HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works 20 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Nowhere does it say he calls himself the creator. I'd be looking at the media for labelling him that.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 8 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

They're replying to the article title, which was incorrect but has now been fixed.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 2 points 14 hours ago

Nowhere did they say he called himself the creator, either. They only replied to the statement presented.

[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 9 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

You're thinking of the ARPANET. When people think of the Internet. They think of the network that Gore pushed hard to open to the public. And the interface Lee designed. Gopher is having a small resurgence, and Gemini exists. But effectively what the average person sees as the Internet is their child philosophically.

I mean as a techy you aren't wrong. There's a lot of underlying things and technologies that sort of glosses over. But to the layperson at large we're just pedantically nitpicking.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 15 minutes ago* (last edited 12 minutes ago)

But to the layperson at large we’re just pedantically nitpicking.

Important to mention. The idea that the internet isn't actually on their box is already a frontier of public communications.

But, for Lemmy's sake, yeah email, straming, VOIP and video calling, whatever IOT or app protocol.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Gopher is having a small resurgence, and Gemini exists.

You forgot email. That seems like a pretty important use of the Internet that isn't the web.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 4 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

"Technically correct" is the best kind of correct.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

It's really not though. Except in that one case.

[–] rollin@piefed.social 7 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

And the "World Wide Web" mostly means HTML - "hypertext" documents which can be published on the internet, and which are regular documents but with embedded links to other documents (hyperlinks), and a vision to ultimately create the "semantic web" - human-readable text which can also be processed by computers.

[–] flubba86@lemmy.world 28 points 19 hours ago

To be exact, Tim Berners Lee invented the original HTML specification, the HTTP communication protocol, and a proof-of-concept browser that implements both of them. These three things were required - on top of TCP, IP, Ethernets, that already existed - to build the Web.

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 6 points 19 hours ago

The original hypertext proposal was even more complex than what we ended up getting, connecting ideas both ways.