This is for Everyone

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web. This is a memoir in which he shares the story of his remarkable life and gives a fascinating account of how the world wide web came to be. Unlike so much of what makes up the internet today, the web was not invented in or by a tech company.

It was created by a physicist working at CERN who began by wanting to create an information sharing system for the people working within the organisation. This led him to creating universal protocols that would enable anyone, anywhere in the world, to communicate with anyone else.

This is something that we take completely for granted, but few people thought it was possible when Berners-Lee began to work on the problem in the late 1980’s.

He writes about the way he developed HTTP protocols, how URLs came to be, the first browser wars in which Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the big winner, the development of search engines and Google’s page rank which led to their total dominance of the search market, the coming of mobile internet, social media, and AI…

There are a lot of people involved in this history, plenty of collaborations and a whole lot of competition. This book is full of interesting stories and moments of discovery when you learn something unexpected about a familiar piece of technology.

The most remarkable thing about the web is the fact that it was made available to everyone for free. Berners-Lee was motivated by a desire to create a universal platform that was open to all, where anyone could share knowledge, connect, and contribute, irrespective of who they were and where they lived.

He achieved that goal, but he admits that things have gone awry. Internet 1.0 which was a creative, collaborative, non-commercial space has been replaced by platforms and silos and social media apps which mine users for data and have turned our attention into a marketable product.

He writes about the need for a web that's intentional, where users have full control of their data and platforms are not incentivised to keep people scrolling for hours on end. He offers solutions in the form of products that he and others are involved in creating, which will hopefully provide an alternative to the internet as we know it today. 

This is, on the whole, an optimistic book. The narrative is warm and tinged with a wry humour that makes it appealing. It does get technical here and there, but it’s well worth reading.