this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.

Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.

In Australia to promote his book, This is for Everyone, Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become – and how he and a community of collaborators can put the power of the web back into the hands of its users.

Berners-Lee describes his excitement in the earliest years of the web as “uncontainable”. Approaching 40 years on, a rebellion is brewing among himself and a community of like-minded activists and developers.

“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.

Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by “charlatans”.

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[–] darkpanda@lemmy.ca 114 points 3 days ago (4 children)

They kind of fix this in the lede, but dude did not invent the internet, he invented the World Wide Web. The internet is a superset of a whole bunch of things that includes the World Wide Web, but dude wasn’t out there inventing TCP/IP and routers and whatnot.

[–] HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works 22 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Nowhere does it say he calls himself the creator. I'd be looking at the media for labelling him that.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

They're replying to the article title, which was incorrect but has now been fixed.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago

Nowhere did they say he called himself the creator, either. They only replied to the statement presented.

[–] LittleBorat3@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

People say wifi when they mean the Internet, somehow one cannot expect accuracy. Articles always get written by professional clueless people also.

[–] ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I read “professionally clueless people” ah journalists

[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 10 points 3 days ago (4 children)

You're thinking of the ARPANET. When people think of the Internet. They think of the network that Gore pushed hard to open to the public. And the interface Lee designed. Gopher is having a small resurgence, and Gemini exists. But effectively what the average person sees as the Internet is their child philosophically.

I mean as a techy you aren't wrong. There's a lot of underlying things and technologies that sort of glosses over. But to the layperson at large we're just pedantically nitpicking.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Gopher is having a small resurgence, and Gemini exists.

You forgot email. That seems like a pretty important use of the Internet that isn't the web.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

"Technically correct" is the best kind of correct.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago

It's really not though. Except in that one case.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

But to the layperson at large we’re just pedantically nitpicking.

Important to mention. The idea that the internet isn't actually on their box is already a frontier of public communications.

But, for Lemmy's sake, yeah email, straming, VOIP and video calling, whatever IOT or app protocol.

[–] dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

email, straming, VOIP and video calling, whatever IOT or app protocol.

Only email and VOIP are the two non-web based techs. HTTP (streaming, video calling, IOT, and app apis) is web, not internet tech. HTTP is a big piece of the internet. Nearly everything runs on HTTP.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The actual video data is not HTTP, because how would that even work, and I was just working on an API that's over raw TCP recently.

Yes, it is a huge piece, though, and has a way of spreading even into places you don't technically need it.

[–] dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

why isnt an octet stream http? it absolutely works lol. web browsers only know http not some random protocol from the server

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Obviously if it's a web app client it's going to load in HTTP before whatever other thing begins, but Zoom has a standalone application, and so does WhatsApp. I'm not even sure if they have web app offerings as well.

An octet stream itself is just an octet stream - raw data. If it's HTTP so was a teletype connection in the 70's.

[–] rollin@piefed.social 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

And the "World Wide Web" mostly means HTML - "hypertext" documents which can be published on the internet, and which are regular documents but with embedded links to other documents (hyperlinks), and a vision to ultimately create the "semantic web" - human-readable text which can also be processed by computers.

[–] flubba86@lemmy.world 34 points 3 days ago

To be exact, Tim Berners Lee invented the original HTML specification, the HTTP communication protocol, and a proof-of-concept browser that implements both of them. These three things were required - on top of TCP, IP, Ethernets, that already existed - to build the Web.

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 7 points 3 days ago

The original hypertext proposal was even more complex than what we ended up getting, connecting ideas both ways.