The Man Who Changed The World

By Sanjiv Bhattacharya

First published by Esquire (UK), Jul 2016

No other living person has shaped our lives more than Tim Berners-Lee. Even when Steve Jobs was alive it was close. The personal computer had many architects. And the internet, too, was the work of dozens of scientists at the US Department of Defense going back to the 50s. But the worldwide web had just one creator, and he built it for neither profit nor power. The platform on which Zuckerberg and Bezos have built empires was given freely to the world by an Englishman from South West London, a modest genius who has fought to keep it free and open ever since.

It’s a measure of Berners-Lee’s influence that the web and the internet are often regarded as synonymous. But they’re not. Strictly speaking, the internet is the base network, and the web is a network on top. Or rather - if the internet is the air, then the web is the oxygen, the part we use. When we say that the internet has transformed our communication, media, science, community, commerce, politics, identity - our everything - we really mean the web. Because before Berners-Lee, the internet was largely irrelevant, little more than a raggedy quilt of networks in which engineers pinged information to each other. In the 70s, Arthur C Clarke envisaged a world in which regular people would communicate through personal computers, but until Berners-Lee, no one had done anything about it.

In 1989, he was an Oxford physicist working at CERN in Switzerland, where the world’s finest minds smash particles into each other in giant accelerators in an effort to decode the essential building blocks of the universe. Berners-Lee managed the computer systems, and he was frustrated. All these scientists had different computers that ran on incompatible programs so their data couldn’t be easily shared or linked. So in what he describes as “an act of desperation” he came up with the building blocks of our online universe instead - the common language of HTML, the shared information transfer protocol of HTTP and the URL conventions that we know today.

The Berners-Lee story is internet legend by now. And a few lessons ring loud and clear. Firstly, innovation happens on the fringes, not the center. CERN wasn’t interested in a new network or transfer protocol - its main mission searching for the ‘God’ particle and such like. But Berners-Lee had a boss who gave him room to play, to indulge in a side project and, as he has said, “kick the tyres of this new computer we had…” Let creative people tinker and they might just change the world.

Lesson two - true genius is visionary, not technical. Berners-Lee isn’t feted for creating html, but for the imaginative leap that came with it. He asked: What if the internet could host a vast library of documents that people the world over could access and add to? Hypertext had already been invented. The internet had been around for decades in one form or another. But it took Berners-Lee to put them together in the service of a grander idea.

What distinguishes the web among so many technological breakthroughs is that it had a moral purpose from day one. While the CERN scientists focused on the smallest particles in the universe, Berners-Lee was thinking big - about making a better world. The revolution he created was no accident - the web was designed to make information free, to accelerate and democratize knowledge and solve humanity’s problems..

The web was such a powerful idea that of course, it didn’t take off at once. Lesson three - even genius needs a sales pitch. Berners-Lee could have just surrendered his invention to the market of ideas, let others champion it if they wanted. But instead, he fought for it - he has always fought for it - often in the face of opposition and indifference. He knew that the web, like any network, would only impress if it was big, so he went out and exhorted his peers to participate. At the Hypertext 1991 conference in San Antonio, Texas, his paper proposing the web was rejected, but he went anyway, and set up a demo at the venue for passing delegates. Incredibly, they were unimpressed.

Objectors, Berners-Lee told the Guardian in 2014, were “people with private agendas, or incumbents who have existing systems that aren’t compatible. But I learned - don’t try to bring them on board. It’s a waste of time. There’s enough people out there who are excited, so work with them.”

And Lesson four - keep it free. In the early days, a competing system called Gopher, run by the University of Minnesota, was actually bigger than the worldwide web. But then the administrators suggested that maybe, just possibly, they would consider a tiny royalty fee for using the network. And just like that, Gopher’s numbers crashed.

Berners-Lee however, made no such demand. He was philosophically opposed. He’d built his web on the principled conviction that great things are possible when free people can connect and communicate without barriers. It’s so ubiquitous today, it’s easy to forget that the web is also the expression of one man’s values, the optimism and altruism of Berners-Lee himself. One wonders how our digital revolution might look had a more mercenary figure taken his place. 

Today, 40% of the world is on the web, and the numbers keep rising. And while a darkness has entered our online lives - as governments surveil and censor, and corporations push for fast lanes and slow - the man who opened the door to it all continues to set a luminous example.

In 1994, Berners-Lee launched the Worldwide Web Consortium and he has fought ever since to keep the web free and open - his optimism was never naïve. And in the midst of all the hungry capitalism and empire building of the internet, his own selflessness is an important reminder of what the web is really about. It’s not theirs, it’s ours.

“I believe the web is under threat,” he once wrote, “but the future [of the web] depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for this extraordinary resource.” We should listen to him.