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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[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Tons of people engage with email regularily, including through standalone MTAs.*

But my point is that email was big before the web even grew to its current significance. So I think common people have at least that one point of contact with the internet that is quite distinct from the web in their memory.

But maybe it's really a generational question. I have to concede that a lot of people now use web interfaces for their email client, especially outside of corporate managed devices. Late milennials and Gen Z will have grown up with the web being more significant than email.

* Don't forget about the MTAs on smartphone OSes, those aren't web based.

-- signed, a late milennial network engineer, whose dad always installed outlook on the family computers

PS: Funny story last week I was at CERN at the CIXP, the CERN Internet Exchange Point, to upgrade a connection to 400Gb/s, and in the lobby of the building they hung up the cover pages of Tim Berners-Lee's original Hypertext and HTTP papers. And further in the have his original NeXTStation displayed