The man who sketched the web on paper napkins at CERN now has to watch it shuffle around in stained sweatpants, working shifts for monopolies that surveil your cousin’s cat pictures and weaponize your grandmother’s political rants. Tim Berners-Lee, knighted not just for giving us hyperlinks but for unleashing the entire World Wide Web on April 30, 1993, has written in The Guardian a kind of parental letter: “Here’s why I set you free, here’s why you turned feral, and here’s how you might grow up before you burn down the house.”
Let’s rewind. In March 1989, Berners-Lee proposed a little thing: marry the internet’s plumbing with hypertext. By 1990, he had a server, a browser, and the first website—basically, a minimalist blog without the Substack cult following. Two years later, it was public. By April 1993, CERN formally renounced ownership, tossing the web into the public domain with the same casual bravado as a parent leaving the front door open and telling the kid: “Run free.” Within months, there were hundreds of servers. Within decades, billions of users. Within minutes of you reading this, three apps are trying to sell you shoes you glanced at once in 2017.
The Original Sin: Generosity
Berners-Lee explains why they gave it away: a royalty-free, universally accessible standard was the only way to make the thing scale. He wasn’t trying to invent a franchise. He wanted interoperability—no gatekeepers, no toll booths, no licensing fees. That’s why in 1994 he launched the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a global nonprofit club to keep the standards open, like referees guarding against monopolists who prefer private islands over public squares.
The logic was simple: if the web had been paywalled or siloed, we’d still be faxing PDFs to one another and congratulating ourselves for inventing “email++.” The openness catalyzed the explosion. Anyone could build, anyone could publish, anyone could read. By the late ’90s, Yahoo was a portal, Google was a grad project, Amazon was just books, and Facebook didn’t exist to mine your personality. We got the dream. Briefly.
The Fall: Surveillance Capitalism
Fast-forward to today and Sir Tim’s lament reads like the parent who gave their kid free tuition, only to see them drop out to join a pyramid scheme. The open bazaar mutated into walled gardens. Monopolistic platforms learned that the human brain is easier to monetize than banner ads. Personal data became the new crude oil—harvested, refined, and sold back to us in the form of targeted outrage. The algorithm isn’t your librarian; it’s a drunk hype man egging on your worst impulses.
Berners-Lee calls it plainly: the web’s drift into monopolistic control has eroded mental health, privacy, and social cohesion. Once an open library, it’s now a casino floor with no clocks and free drinks. The dealer knows your tells better than you do.
Solid as a Rock (Or a Pod)
But Sir Tim isn’t just sighing into his tea. He’s pitching a corrective. His project, Solid—incubated at his company Inrupt—imagines decentralized “pods” where individuals store their own data. Instead of platforms owning your history like feudal lords hoarding grain, you’d grant or revoke access at will. Want to let an app see your photos? Fine. Want to yank them back? Also fine. The data is yours, not their balance sheet’s.
It’s the same principle as the web’s birth: interoperability, competition, and agency. He wants to reassert open standards. Force portability. Mandate interoperability. Make companies compete on service, not on how efficiently they can trick you into doomscrolling.
The AI Parallel: Don’t Repeat the Mistake
Here’s the twist. Berners-Lee warns: the AI wave is about to replay the web’s mistakes on steroids. Right now, AI is the wild west of opacity—black boxes spitting out confident nonsense while their makers sprint for monopoly. He’s calling for urgent nonprofit governance, global oversight, and open standards. Basically, a CERN for AI: collaboration without ownership, transparency without shareholder meetings.
He knows what happens otherwise. We’ll wake up in a decade and realize that two corporations own the world’s cognition. They’ll rent us back our own creativity, with a subscription fee. You’ll need premium access to your own ideas.
What He’s Actually Saying Between the Lines
- Governments: Stop pretending antitrust is a forgotten Latin phrase.
- Companies: Your “trust and safety” teams can’t be interns with a Slack channel.
- Citizens: Owning your data isn’t a metaphor. It’s a political project.
- AI developers: If you build walled gardens, the harvest will be authoritarianism.
He doesn’t phrase it with my sarcasm, but that’s the vibe. The web worked because it was open. It broke because it was captured. AI stands at the fork. Either we build collaborative governance, or we let the biggest wallets write the constitution of human thought.
The Bitter Irony
Remember: the very fact you’re reading this is proof Berners-Lee’s gamble succeeded. He gave away the blueprint, and in return we got global connectivity, instantaneous publishing, and the ability to binge cat memes at 3 a.m. But also, the Nazis got back into mainstream politics, misinformation spreads faster than truth, and teenagers measure self-worth in dopamine notifications. The gift came with curses.
Berners-Lee is right to call it out. He didn’t unleash the web to be the scaffolding for ad-tech monopolies and conspiracy forums. He built it for human creativity, knowledge-sharing, and connection. That purpose hasn’t died; it’s just buried under clickbait, engagement farming, and quarterly earnings.
Satire of the Whole Tragedy
Imagine the boardroom in 1993 if CERN had tried to keep ownership. They’d still be arguing about licensing fees while AOL mailed you another CD-ROM. Instead, he gave it away. And what did we do with it? We invented Candy Crush, personalized disinformation, and billion-dollar valuation spreadsheets that classify whether your browsing history counts as “male, 25–34, anxious.”
The web’s guardianship is now run by the same companies whose entire business model depends on making sure you never close the tab. And we’re shocked that Berners-Lee is begging us not to repeat the mistake with AI? That’s like ignoring the parent who told you not to touch the stove because they literally invented the stove.
What Comes Next
His prescriptions aren’t utopian. They’re baseline survival:
- Data Portability: You move your content like you move your furniture. If you can’t carry it out of Facebook, you don’t own it.
- Interoperability: Messaging apps must talk to each other like email does.
- Algorithmic Accountability: No more “trade secret” excuses for amplifying genocide.
- International Oversight: If CERN could unite physicists, we can unite regulators.
This isn’t radical. It’s the floor. Without it, the web will collapse into private fiefdoms and AI will follow as the next enclosure.
The Long Goodbye
The web was never just code. It was an ethos: freedom, universality, collaboration. Berners-Lee is haunted not because it failed, but because it succeeded too well—so well that its openness was weaponized. He is effectively holding up a mirror: you broke it; fix it.
And the haunting part? He’s not even nostalgic. He’s pragmatic. The past is gone; the question is whether we salvage the future. He doesn’t want a eulogy for the web. He wants an intervention for its successor.
Ledger of the Lost Web
- 1989 Proposal → “Let’s connect information like neurons.”
- 1990 First Server → The crib.
- 1991 Public Access → The toddler learns to walk.
- 1993 Public Domain → The front door flung open.
- 1994 W3C → The babysitter hired.
- 2025 Berners-Lee → “The kid is a burnout. Get them therapy before AI repeats the cycle.”
When the Net Became the Trap
This isn’t a love letter to nostalgia. It’s a courtroom exhibit. Evidence A: monopolies. Evidence B: surveillance ads. Evidence C: teenagers glued to phones. Exhibit D: democracy wobbling on its axis because misinformation has a better ad budget than truth. The web was supposed to liberate knowledge. Instead, it became the cheapest way to radicalize your uncle and sell him nutritional supplements.
Berners-Lee’s Solid pods aren’t just tech; they’re ideology. They flip the script: power should reside with people, not platforms. That’s not a slogan. It’s the difference between an internet you inhabit and an internet that inhabits you.
The Last Word
Sir Tim’s essay isn’t quaint nostalgia. It’s a fire alarm. The house he built for us is on fire, and the new AI wing is being constructed with the same faulty wiring. He’s begging us not to nod politely and then walk back into the flames.
The question isn’t whether the web was a gift. It was. The question is whether we keep breaking every gift until nothing is left to give.
The Ghost in the Machine
The father of the web is telling us his creation has become unrecognizable: captured by monopolies, exploited for profit, corrosive to society. His solution is simple but radical: give people control of their data, force open standards, and build AI governance on CERN’s collaborative model rather than Silicon Valley’s casino floor.
The ghost in the machine isn’t Berners-Lee’s regret—it’s our indifference. The web was meant to be a commons. If we don’t reclaim it, AI will be the sequel we don’t survive.