The World Wide Web: Tim Berners-Lee's Gift to Everyone
“In 1989 a physicist in Switzerland wrote a memo proposing a system for sharing documents. His boss wrote 'vague but exciting' on the cover. Tim Berners-Lee could have patented his invention and become the richest person on Earth. He gave it away for free — and that decision changed what the internet became.”
In March 1989, a 33-year-old British physicist at CERN — the particle physics laboratory in Geneva — was frustrated.
He worked in an organisation with thousands of researchers who came and went, each holding knowledge in their own systems and their own heads. When someone left, their expertise often left with them. When someone new arrived, there was no way to find what their predecessor had known. Information was isolated in pockets.
He had an idea. What if documents could link to each other? What if you could click a word and jump to another document that explained it, anywhere on the network?
He wrote a proposal and gave it to his manager, Mike Sendall. On the cover, Sendall wrote: "Vague but exciting."
That proposal was the World Wide Web. And Tim Berners-Lee's manager was right on both counts.
Three Inventions That Made It Work
The web required three things that didn't previously exist together:
HTML — a language for writing documents with structure (headings, paragraphs, links) that any computer could display. Try the editor above: <h1> makes a heading, <p> makes a paragraph, <a href="#"> makes a clickable link. The h in <h1> stands for heading, the p for paragraph. The tag system is simple enough to learn in minutes, powerful enough to describe any document.
HTTP — a protocol for requesting and sending those documents over the internet. When your browser wants a page, it sends an HTTP "GET" request to a server: "Please send me this document." The server sends it back. HTTP defines exactly how that exchange works: what the request looks like, what a successful response looks like, what an error looks like. Without a shared protocol, browsers and servers couldn't communicate.
URLs — addresses for individual documents. https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html is a URL. It tells your browser exactly where to find a specific document on a specific server. The concept that any document on the network could have a permanent, unique, shareable address seems obvious in retrospect. Before Berners-Lee, it wasn't.
HTML, HTTP, URLs. Three inventions, one person, about 18 months of work.
The First Website
On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published the world's first website at info.cern.ch. It described what the web was and how it worked. At that point, there was exactly one website on Earth.
That website still exists. You can visit it today. It looks exactly as it did in 1991: black text on a white background, blue hyperlinks. No images. No video. No navigation menus. Just text and links — the bare minimum to demonstrate the idea.
The Decision That Changed Everything
In April 1993, CERN's management faced a choice: patent the web and licence it to generate revenue for the organisation, or release it for free.
They released it. The web was placed in the public domain — no patent, no royalty, no permission required to use HTML or HTTP. Anyone could build a website, write a browser, or create a web server without paying anyone anything.
This was not an obvious decision. Berners-Lee himself could have patented his inventions independently. He chose not to. He has since said he was afraid that a patented, proprietary web would fragment into competing versions — some companies implementing one flavour, others another, and no browser able to display all websites.
By keeping it open, one universal web emerged. One set of standards. Any browser could display any website. Any person anywhere could publish a page. The entry cost was approximately zero.
From 1 to a Billion
In 1991 there was one website. By 1993, 130. By 1996, 600,000. By 2000, 17 million. Today, estimates put the number above a billion registered domains.
The growth wasn't linear. It was explosive because the web has network effects: every new website makes all existing websites more useful (there's more to link to), which attracts more users, which attracts more websites. A technology where the value grows with the number of users grows very differently from one that doesn't.
The web also benefited from browsers becoming free and easy to install. Mosaic (1993), the first graphical browser, could display images alongside text — not just text on white backgrounds. You could see photographs, diagrams, layouts. Mosaic's creators went on to found Netscape. Microsoft built Internet Explorer. The browser wars of the 1990s — billions of dollars spent competing for users — were only possible because the underlying web was open and free.
What the Web Is Still Not
The web is not the internet. It is one application on the internet.
Email uses the internet but not the web (it has its own protocols: SMTP, IMAP). Video calls use the internet but not the web. Online games use the internet but not the web. Each of these uses the same underlying TCP/IP infrastructure but speaks different application-level protocols.
The web is specifically: HTML documents linked by hyperlinks, requested via HTTP, addressed by URLs, displayed in browsers. That's it. It happens to be by far the most visible part of the internet — which is why people confuse the two.
In 2025 the web is so woven into daily life that most people experience the internet through it almost exclusively. But the pipes underneath — the physical cables, the routing protocols, the data centres — were there 20 years before Berners-Lee's memo. The web is what made them useful to everyone.
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Tim Berners-Lee has said he regrets one small decision: putting two forward slashes after 'http:' in URLs (http://). He's said it was unnecessary — 'http:' alone would have worked fine. Every URL ever typed, every sign ever printed, every link ever written has included those two extra characters. Estimate how many times those slashes have been typed across all of human history since 1991. What would you have done differently about the web if you'd invented it?
Reflect
Tim Berners-Lee invented one of the most valuable technologies in human history and chose not to become a billionaire from it. He said the web would not have grown the way it did if it had been patented. Do you think that was the right choice? Are there other technologies that should be in the public domain that currently aren't? What about medicines, or AI models?