A review of the new book “This Is For Everyone” by Tim Berners-Lee (2025)
The World Wide Web is one of the most transformative technological developments in the history of humankind. It was invented by the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 when he was 34 and working at CERN in Switzerland. He chose to give it to the world for free.
In 1999, he wrote a book called “Weaving The Web” in which he explained why and how he developed the web and described its early evolution. At that time, the Internet was being used by around 150 million people. A quarter of a century later, Berners-Lee is nearing the end of his illustrious career and the web now has over 5.5 billion users or close to 70% of the global population. His new book is very readable, if rather unexciting, and it is part memoir and part manifesto.
The memoir material sets out how both his parents were mathematicians and electrical engineers, how he did a degree in physics at Oxford University, how he conceived the web as simply “the slow and patient crystallization of an idea”, how he created the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to formulate evolving standards for different features of the web and the the World Wide Web Foundation to promote the greater use of the network, and how he has pushed for more open use of data through initiatives like the non-profit Open Data Institute and his new business Inrupt (a name combining the words ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’).
He invented URLs, HTTP and HTML – all of which are still the beating heart of the web. He writes about the browser wars (Viola vs Mosaic and Netscape vs Explorer), the growing dominance of a small number of behemoths (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta), and the huge impact of artificial intelligence: “I’m not terrified of AI. But I think that we do have to control it.”. Along the way, we learn about some of the many awards that he has received, his three wives two children, and three stepchildren, his love of sailing, and his admiration for Wikipedia (“probably the best single example of what I wanted the web to be”).
The manifesto element is driven by his concern at how the web has developed: “I had known for a while that something was wrong with the web. What was intended to be a tool for creativity and collaboration had become divisive, polarizing and toxic.”. He writes: “I generally oppose the regulation of the web” and “My feeling is that regulation should be minimal”, but he does want to see regulation of “the addictive algorithms”.
He came to resent the commercialisation of the web: “The user had been reduced to a consumable product for the advertiser. Expectations of privacy, of dignity, of sovereignty, had been corroded in the quest for profit.” Above all, he wants the user to have complete ownership and control of their data, to be able to hold all of it in one place, and to be able to link any of their data with any other data.
Therefore he is pushing hard for something which he used to call Personal Online Data Stores or pods but which he now terms ‘data wallets’ which would be enabled through a new protocol called Social Linked Data or Solid. Optimistically he declares “I anticipate the growth of Solid as being similar to the growth of the web.” Really?
Berners-Lee is a brilliant man, liberal and humanistic, motivated by people rather than profit. But perhaps he is simply too idealistic. I believe it is too late to regulate the Internet as some of us argued and too improbable to expect that we can now reclaim ownership of our data from the monopolistic giants who control the web.