The man who invented the world wide web

Heading to a mentor’s funeral in Greece in August 2001, Tim Berners-Lee found himself and a colleague flying right over the Parthenon, “the two of us peering out of the window to the Agora steps where Socrates conducted his dialogues.”

- Rahul Jacob

Tim Berners-Lee at the Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal.

(GETTY IMAGES)

Berners-Lee, the founder of the world wide web, and his fellow traveller Jean-Francois Abramatic, then chairman of the not-for-profit consortium that in effect managed the world wide web in the late 1990s, turned philosophical.Berners-Lee wondered if we might face another dark age or if the world had reached a point “where civilisation and liberal democracy are locked in?” Abramatic confidently said that liberal democracy was “so strong and growing in concert with technology” that the benefits were here to stay. Less than a fortnight later, in the middle of a meeting on the world wide web, the two turned on the news to learn of the 9/11 attacks.

Reading Berners-Lee’s engaging memoir, This is for Everyone, one is reminded that the optimism about the web (and likely some of the current hype about Artificial Intelligence) has been overdone. Berners-Lee, who is the rare individual who put brotherhood before billions in what now seems like a dystopian world dominated by the tech bros, has written a memoir alive to the dangers of extreme polarisation on social media but remains a tech optimist at heart.

How could it be otherwise? Berners-Lee generously gave the world the protocols of HTTP, HTML and URL for free in the 1990s and early on had to fend off efforts to monetise this terrain. He remains a believer in a kind of Athenian democracy for the web, but circa 2025, this vision seems naive.

In the past months, headlines or pronouncements involving US-based tech bros—especially of the more than occasionally anti-immigrant rhetoric from the coterie that includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and military intelligence company Palantir’s founder Alex Karp—have rained on us like a relentless monsoon. A recent column in