![\"Portrait](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/SEI_270593289.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Tim Berners-Lee in a rack of the CERN computer centre<\/p>\n
Brice, Maximilien\/CERN<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Tim Berners-Lee has a map of everything on the internet<\/a>. It can fit on a single page and consists of around 100 blocks connected by dozens of arrows. There are blocks for things like blogs, podcasts and group messages, but also more abstract concepts like creativity, collaboration and clickbait. It plots the lay of the digital landscape from a unique vantage point: the view of the man who invented the World Wide Web.<\/p>\n \u201cMost of it is good,\u201d he tells me, sitting in New Scientist\u2019s London offices, as we discuss what has gone wrong and what has gone right with the web. He created the map to help show others \u2013 and\u00a0perhaps also\u00a0remind himself \u2013 that the parts of the internet judged as causing harm to society form only a small fraction of it. The top left quadrant makes\u00a0it\u00a0clear where Berners-Lee thinks the problem lies. Six blocks earn the label \u201charmful\u201d.\u00a0Written inside are the words:\u00a0Facebook, Instagram,\u00a0Snapchat, TikTok,\u00a0X\u00a0and\u00a0YouTube.<\/p>\n Over the past 35 years or so, Berners-Lee has watched his invention go from a single user (himself) to\u00a05.5 billion<\/a> \u2013 about 70 per cent of the world\u2019s population. It has revolutionised everything from how we communicate to how we shop. Modern life is unimaginable without it. But it also has a growing list of problems.<\/p>\n Misinformation<\/a>,\u00a0polarisation, election manipulation and\u00a0problematic social media use have all become synonymous with the web. It is a far cry from the collaborative utopia Berners-Lee envisioned. As he writes in his new memoir, This\u00a0Is\u00a0For\u00a0Everyone<\/a>, \u201cIn the early days of the web, delight and surprise were everywhere, but today online life is as likely to induce anxiety as joy.\u201d<\/p>\n It would be totally understandable if the web\u2019s inventor were a bit sour about what humanity has done with his life\u2019s work, but he is far from it. In fact, Berners-Lee is extraordinarily optimistic about the future, and the future of the web. As one of the most influential technological thinkers of our time (with a long list of awards and a knighthood to prove it), he has plenty to say about what\u2019s gone wrong \u2013 and most importantly, how he hopes to fix it.<\/p>\n Inventing the web<\/p>\n The origin story of the World Wide Web is partly about being in the right place at the right time. In the late 1980s, Berners-Lee was working in the Computing and Networks division at CERN<\/a>, the particle physics lab\u00a0near Geneva, Switzerland, and\u00a0he\u00a0was\u00a0wondering whether\u00a0there was a better way to manage all the documentation.<\/p>\n Most systems forced users to follow particular rules for how documents should be organised, imposing strict hierarchies and relationships. Berners-Lee thought it would be better to let people connect documents in any way they liked. Hyperlinks<\/a> already existed for linking things together within documents, and the internet already existed as a way to share files, so why not put the two together? This simple, yet groundbreaking idea became the World Wide Web.<\/p>\n The idea existed for some time in Berners-Lee\u2019s head before, in 1989, he eventually convinced a sympathetic boss to let him pursue it full-time. In a matter of months, he produced a burst of acronymic activity that spawned HTML, a programming language for building web pages; HTTP, a protocol for sending them; and URLs, a way to locate them. Just 9555 lines of code in total. By the time the year was out,\u00a0the web was born.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cCERN was a really great place to invent the web,\u201d he says. \u201cIt has people from all over the world who have this desperate need to communicate and to document their lives and their systems.\u201d<\/p>\n The first website, which was hosted on Berners-Lee\u2019s work computer with a do-not-turn-off sign stuck to the front, outlined what the web was and how to join in. A few web servers sprang up, then a few more. \u201cIt went up by a factor of 10 in the first year, and then it went up by a factor of 10 the second year. And then in the third year [it] went up by a factor of 10 again\u201d, he says. \u201cEven back then, you could see that we were onto something. You had to buckle up and hold on.\u201d<\/p>\n Most of the early web pages were made by academics and software developers,\u00a0but people soon started to use them to put everything and anything on the internet. Within a decade, there were millions of websites, hundreds of millions of users and enough internet companies to fill a\u00a0dot-com stock market bubble.<\/a><\/p>\n The Spice Girls pose with the band\u2019s website in 1997<\/p>\n David Corio\/Redferns\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Despite the huge money-spinning opportunities of the web, Berners-Lee felt that for it to reach its true potential, it needed to be free and open. But that was easier said than done. As he had developed the software underpinning the web while at CERN, the organisation had a legitimate claim to charge royalties to anyone who used it. Berners-Lee turned to his superiors and pleaded the case that the technology should be donated to the world. It took a while to find someone who could actually sign off on such a thing, but in 1993, the full source code of the web was published along with the disclaimer, \u201cCERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code<\/a>.\u201d The web would be royalty-free forever.<\/p>\n The early days<\/p>\n For the first few decades of its life, the web seemed to be going pretty well.\u00a0Yes, there was the\u00a0infamous turn-of-the-millennium stock market crash,\u00a0though\u00a0this was\u00a0arguably the\u00a0fault of venture capital speculation rather than the web, per se. Pirating was certainly on the rise and\u00a0malware seemed to be just one bad click away, but it was largely free, open and fun. \u201cPeople loved the web so much. They were just delighted,\u201d writes Berners-Lee\u00a0in his memoir.<\/p>\n Capturing the mood of the time, he believed that the web could unlock a completely new form of human collaboration. He coined the term \u201cintercreativity\u201d to describe a group, rather than an individual, becoming a creative entity.\u00a0Wikipedia<\/a>, with its\u00a0nearly\u00a065\u00a0million English-language pages\u00a0written and edited by\u00a015 million people,\u00a0epitomises\u00a0what he had in mind. The site takes pride of place\u00a0in\u00a0his\u00a0map\u00a0and he describes it as \u201cprobably the best single example\u201d of what he wanted the web to be.<\/p>\n Of course, this age of unfettered web optimism didn\u2019t last forever. For Berners-Lee, it was 2016 when he began to feel like something was fundamentally wrong. \u201cThere was the Brexit election and the first Trump election,\u201d he says. \u201cAt that point, people started to say it is possible that people have been manipulated using social media into voting for something that is not in their best interest. In other words, the web was part of a powerful manipulation of individuals by large organisations.\u201d<\/p>\n Historically, political campaigns would \u201cbroadcast\u201d their messages to voters out in the open, where\u00a0everything could be seen \u2013 and, crucially,\u00a0criticised.\u00a0However, by the mid-2010s, social media had made it possible to \u201cnarrowcast\u201d, as Berners-Lee puts it. Political messages could be turned into a thousand variations, each\u00a0targeted at\u00a0a\u00a0different group. Keeping track of who was saying what and to whom\u00a0became much harder.<\/a>\u00a0So too\u00a0did\u00a0countering\u00a0misleading claims.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n How much this kind of microtargeting affects elections is still up for debate. Many studies have\u00a0attempted\u00a0to quantify how people\u2019s views and voting intentions change when they see such messages, but the\u00a0studies\u00a0have generally\u00a0found\u00a0only\u00a0small effects.<\/a> Either way, it plays into a bigger concern that Berners-Lee has around social media.<\/p>\n He says social media\u00a0companies have an incentive to keep your attention, which drives them to build \u201caddictive\u201d algorithms. \u201cIt\u2019s human nature to be attracted by things that make you angry,\u201d he says. \u201cIf social media feeds you something which is untrue, you\u2019re more likely to click on it. You\u2019re more likely to stay on the platform.\u201d<\/p>\n He cites author Yuval Noah Harari, who has argued that people who make \u201cbad\u201d algorithms should be held accountable<\/a> for their recommendations. \u201cYou have to specifically outlaw addictive systems,\u201d says Berners-Lee. However, he recognises that a ban isn\u2019t exactly in line with his usual free-and-open approach. It is a choice of last resort. Social media can connect people and spread ideas, but it also has a particular problem in causing harm, he writes in the new book: \u201cWe need to change that, one way or another.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, he\u00a0remains\u00a0positive about where the web could be heading.\u00a0Social media<\/a> is just a small part of the internet map \u2013 even if it does draw a lot of our attention. Fixing it should be part of\u00a0efforts to\u00a0improve\u00a0the web at large, and key\u00a0to that is\u00a0reclaiming digital sovereignty, he says.<\/p>\n A plan to make the web work for everyone<\/p>\n To that end, for the past decade, Berners-Lee has been working towards a new approach that hands the initiative back to individuals. Currently, different internet platforms control your data.<\/a> You can\u2019t easily post a Snapchat video you have made to your Facebook feed or a LinkedIn post to your Instagram account, for example. You have created those posts, but the respective companies own them. <\/p>\n Berners-Lee\u2019s idea is that, rather than being spread between different platforms and companies, your data would sit in a single data wallet that you control, called a pod (short for \u201cpersonal online data store\u201d). Everything from family photos to medical records could live there, and it is up to you to decide if you want to share any of it. This isn\u2019t just theoretical; he has co-founded a company called\u00a0Inrupt\u00a0to try to make this approach a reality.<\/a><\/p>\n Berners-Lee in 1994, with an early form of the websites and web browsers that he invented at CERN<\/p>\n CERN<\/p>\n<\/p>\n He is particularly excited about the potential for data wallets to combine with\u00a0artificial intelligence.<\/a> He\u00a0gives\u00a0the\u00a0example of trying to buy a pair of running shoes. If you used any of the current AI chatbots, you would have to spend time explaining what you were looking for before they could make a decent recommendation. But if an AI had access to your data wallet, it would already know all your measurements and your entire workout history \u2013 and perhaps your spending history, too \u2013 so it could precisely match your profile with the right shoe.<\/p>\n The AI should work for you, not big tech, says Berners-Lee. This isn\u2019t about building your own AI, but about having guarantees baked into the software. Data wallets are one part of that, although he also says that AIs should be signed up to a sort of\u00a0digital\u00a0Hippocratic oath to do no harm<\/a>. It should be like \u201cyour own personal assistant\u201d,\u00a0he says.<\/p>\n![\"UNITED](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/SEI_270599209.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Berners-Lee](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/SEI_270593094.jpg\")
<\/p>\n