Summary
Tim Berners-Lee invented the tech underlying every website you visit, and in the more than 30 years since, neither he nor CERN (the European physics research lab based near Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked) has ever charged a cent to use it. The web wasn’t the only hypertext-based system competing for the top spot in the early 1990s, and it wasn’t even the most well-engineered. What made it win was the two-page memo CERN signed in 1993, which gave the whole thing away for free, right when a rival protocol tried charging for the same idea. CERN’s real problem in 1989 was about losing track of stuff A physicist’s memory problem started it all Berners-Lee wrote up the idea for hypertext in March 1989 while working at CERN, in a document named “Information Management: A Proposal.” It wasn’t planned as anything world-changing, but more as a solution to CERN’s thousands of people, projects, and machines cycling through constantly. Information kept getting lost when people left, so his proposal pitched linked, decentralized documents (hypertext) as the answer. His supervisor left a now famous note, calling the idea “vague, but exciting.” Of course, an idea, even a proposal like this, isn’t a product. Berners-Lee built HTTP, HTML, and the URL system from scratch, and then wrote the first web browser/editor named WorldWideWeb (renamed to Nexus later to avoid confusion). He also created the first web server, hosting CERN’s own website, which went live in 1991. It’s still online, too, like several other ‘90s-internet relics. CERN signed away rights to its own invention in a two-page document Two signatures leading to zero royalties Walter Hoogland and Helmut Weber, CERN’s directors at the time, signed a document that said: “CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it.” Later, Hoogland said, “Most people would agree that the public release was the best thing we could have done, and that it was the source of the success of the World Wide Web.” Berners-Lee agreed, saying that without the document, there would be no web. The web’s closest rival tried the opposite move at the same time Gopher charged for its tech, but didn’t survive the year Gopher was a protocol developed at The University of Minnesota, and was arguably more popular than the web during 1992. In spring 1993, the university introduced licensing fees of hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the company licensing it. The backlash was fairly quick: many of the developers upset by the fees had spent months contributing free improvements to Gopher, working in the same open spirit CERN was about to formalize for the web. The Gopher team tried to calm things down with a March 1993 letter admitting “there has been a lot of hysteria, misinformation, and rumor floating around,” but developers were already building on the web instead, and one of Gopher’s own creators later said the fees “socially killed” it. Gopher’s traffic grew 997%, but the web’s grew 341,634%. Once spring of 1994 arrived, web traffic overtook Gopher traffic completely. The only money Berners-Lee has taken for the web came as prizes Awards are nice, but they’re not income in the same way as royalties would have been Berners-Lee never patented the web protocols he invented, and he’s never drawn licensing income from it. He has collected some merit awards for inventing it, like the Millennium Technology Prize in 2004 (1 million, funded by Google). He also received a knighthood the same year as the Millennium Prize. Berners-Lee auctioned off the original web source code as an NFT in 2021 for $5.4 million, donating the proceeds to charity. He still defends the trade-off directly, saying, “It is hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like CERN allowed me to.” Since his invention of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee founded Inrupt, a for-profit company build on his Solid protocol, which is aimed at giving users control over their own data. It’s the same instinct that’s driving other pushes for an open, uncaptured web right now, like the built-from-scratch, independent Ladybird browser engine made specifically to avoid answering to any single company. Nobody has to guess what would’ve happened if he’d cashed in instead Everything traces back to that one memo that gave away the tech behind the web. There weren’t any licensing fees, or permissions needing to be granted to use it. Gopher found out how cashing in would have worked, and, well, it didn’t. That’s still the model Berners-Lee is chasing today with Solid. Every time we use the web now, we can thank Berners-Lee and CERN for giving it to us without cost.