What started off as a proposal in 1989 for information management by an English software engineer at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has led to a scenario three decades later where half the population of the world is online. On its 30th anniversary, Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, says the Web has created opportunities and made our lives easier, but many people feel afraid and unsure if it is really a force for good. “They are all stepping back, suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections, realising that this Web thing that they thought was cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well,” he said.

The Internet opened the way to a technological revolution that has transformed the way people buy goods, share ideas, get information and much more. However, it has also become a place where tech titans scoop up personal data, rival governments spy and seek to scuttle elections and hate speech has thrived, taking the Web far from its roots as a space for progress-oriented minds to collaborate.

In an open letter, Berners-Lee said it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the Web could not change for the better in the next 30 years. “With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, diverse groups of people have been able to agree on essential principles. With the Law of Sea and the Outer Space Treaty, we have preserved new frontiers for the common good. Now too, as the Web reshapes our world, we have a responsibility to make sure it is recognised as a human right and built for the public good,” he said.

Vague, but exciting proposal

In March 1989, while working at CERN, Berners-Lee wrote his first proposal for an Internet-based hypertext system to link and access information across different computers. Mark Sendall, his boss at CERN at the time, labelled it “vague, but exciting”.

He then came up with a system initially called Mesh. It would combine a nascent field of technology called hypertext that allowed for human-readable documents to be linked together. In November 1990, this “web of information nodes in which the user can browse at will” was formalised as a proposal by Berners-Lee, together with a CERN colleague, Robert Cailliau. By Christmas that year, Berners-Lee had implemented key components, namely html, http and URL, and created the first Web server, browser and editor (WorldWideWeb).

To make the Web more widely accessible, a second browser project was developed at CERN: the Line Mode browser. It was first released in 1991 and was compatible with most unix / linux systems.

On 30 April 1993, CERN released the latest version of the www software into the public domain and made it freely available for anyone to use and improve. This decision encouraged the use of the Web, and society to benefit from it.

In 1994, the then US president, Bill Clinton, and Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, were the first global leaders to exchange emails over the world wide web.

Concerns over the digital age

Berners-Lee says the World Wide Web is facing growing pains with issues such as hate speech, privacy concerns and state-sponsored hacking and trumpeting a call to make it better for humanity.

He breaks down the problems the Web now faces into three categories:

1. Deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour, and online harassment.

2. System design that creates perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed, such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation.

3. Unintended negative consequences of benevolent design, such as the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse.

He says, “While the first category is impossible to eradicate completely, we can create both laws and code to minimise this behaviour, just as we have always done offline. The second category requires us to redesign systems in a way that change incentives. And the final category calls for research to understand existing systems and model possible new ones or tweak those we already have.”

A pitch for better standards

Through his foundation, Berners-Lee launched a campaign called ‘Contract For Web’ to “establish clear norms, laws and standards that underpin the Web”. Berners-Lee made the announcement of his new effort at the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, last year. The French government and more than 50 companies, including Facebook and Google, have signed the contract, which is set to be published in full in May. “Those who support it endorse its starting principles and together are working out the specific commitments in each area. No one group should do this alone, and all input will be appreciated. Governments, companies and citizens are all contributing, and we aim to have a result later this year,” he said.