The History of the Web
The Web Was Never Supposed to Be This
Tim Berners-Lee built the World Wide Web to share physics papers, and when he saw what it became, he spent the rest of his life trying to fix it.
The Idea
There is a useful distinction that gets blurred almost every time someone talks about 'the internet': the internet and the web are not the same thing. The internet is the underlying infrastructure — a global network of networks, born from ARPANET in the late 1960s, that moves data between machines using agreed-upon protocols. The web is just one application that runs on top of it, invented in 1989 by a British physicist at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee's original proposal was modest to the point of being almost boring. He wanted researchers at the particle physics lab to be able to link documents to one another — so that a paper could reference another paper and you could follow that connection directly, rather than hunting through filing systems. He called the system of linked documents 'hypertext', combined it with the internet's existing infrastructure, and added three things that still underpin every website you visit: HTML (a way to structure and display content), HTTP (a protocol for transferring it), and URLs (addresses to locate it). What he explicitly did not build in was any mechanism for identity, ownership, or access control. The web was designed to be open and stateless — each request independent, each document freely linkable. That radical openness is what made the web explode across the world in the 1990s. It is also, in retrospect, why so much of what came later — surveillance capitalism, centralised platforms, misinformation — became structurally very difficult to resist.
In the World
In 1993, a 22-year-old student at the University of Illinois named Marc Andreessen released a piece of software called Mosaic. It was the first web browser to display images inline with text — before Mosaic, images and documents were separate things you had to open independently. This sounds trivial. It was not. Mosaic made the web feel like a place rather than a filing cabinet, and within a year it had been downloaded over a million times. Andreessen moved to Silicon Valley, co-founded Netscape, and the browser wars began. But the more important consequence of Mosaic was subtler: it proved that the web could be made viscerally appealing to ordinary people who had no interest in physics papers. The population of web users doubled every few months through the mid-1990s. Investors poured money into anything with a dot-com suffix. The architecture Berners-Lee had sketched on a whiteboard at CERN was suddenly carrying commerce, journalism, and eventually the social fabric of billions of lives. Berners-Lee watched all of this and grew increasingly uneasy. By 2018 he was describing the web he had built as having been 'weaponised' — not by malicious engineers but by economic incentives that the original design had no way to anticipate or resist. He launched a project called Solid, aimed at giving individuals control over their own data rather than ceding it to platforms. As of today, it remains a project. The architecture of openness proved far easier to exploit than to reform.
Why It Matters
Understanding this history changes how you see the platforms you use every day. The centralisation of the web — a handful of companies mediating most of what people read, share, and search — was not inevitable. It was the outcome of a specific design meeting a specific economic moment. The web's openness invited everyone in and gave no one tools to protect themselves from what 'everyone' would eventually include. This matters for how you think about proposals to regulate or redesign the web now. Arguments about data privacy, platform power, and online speech are often framed as battles between freedom and control. But the actual tension runs deeper: the web was built on a philosophy of radical openness, and that philosophy created both its extraordinary flourishing and its most serious problems. Neither side of most tech policy debates fully acknowledges this. Knowing where the web came from also makes you a more sceptical reader of both utopian and dystopian narratives about what the internet is 'doing' to society. It was made by people, making choices, under constraints — and it can be remade the same way.
A Question to Ponder
If you could add one thing to the original architecture of the web — something Berners-Lee left out — what would it be, and what might that change have prevented or created?
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