The Men Who Shaped the Internet Won’t Be Able to Fix It
Tim Berners-Lee dreamed of a World Wide Web for everyone. Nick Clegg and Meta had different ideas. In new books, both ignore how profit undermined the internet.
Illustration: Víctor Arce for Bloomberg
It was a strange moment. In the middle of a stadium pulsing with light and filled with drumbeats, and in front of more than 60,000 people, a middle-aged man in a white linen suit sat typing at an old-fashioned computer. As he looked up, a sentence flashed around him in bright lights and all caps: “THIS IS FOR EVERYONE.” Many of the estimated 900 million people watching this penultimate moment of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony didn’t know who this man was until the announcer explained that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
Thirteen years later, Berners-Lee is making that declaration all over again — this time with a memoir titled after his Olympic message. In the book he details how he came up with the technical mechanics of the web in 1989 as a contractor at Switzerland’s CERN physics laboratory, and grouses about its undemocratic turn in recent years as large tech companies hoover up personal data and steer billions of people toward addictive content.