The Legacy Of The Web: And Where We Go From Here

Forbes

28-03-2025

Portrait of British computer scientist and engineer Tim Berners-Lee as he poses in a classroom at ... More the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 23, 1998. Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, was photographed during a shoot for Red Herring Magazine. (Photo by)
All over the place, you see people making analogies between the current moment in AI and those heady times in the early millennial years when the Internet was taking off in a big way.
Few would contest that the Internet itself was less than a real revolution of its own kind, setting the stage for everything else that's happening in the 21st-century.
Even if we did create all of this new AI capability, how would it move around the world at lightning speed, if not for the global system of interconnects that the Internet represents?
Think back to those times when people struggled to even comprehend how the Internet worked, and what it would look like a quarter century later – i.e. right now.
I caught up with Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the Imagination in Action event at Davos in January, and asked him about what it was like to create the Internet all of those years ago, when he was around 35 years of age.
He stressed the non-commercial nature of his work, and said everything should be 'royalty free' in this kind of innovation.
'I got to meet a lot of interesting people,' he said.
We also talked about how the web has been perceived over the years, and what kind of environment it represents.
Citing a backlash against some kinds of Internet activity like social media. Berners-Lee noted how the Internet really isn't homogenous, but instead, a collection of so many types of content and social arenas, some of which are more valuable than others.
He urged greater regulation of the Internet, to get rid of addictive and harmful elements, and make it safer for children, saying that it's also important for young users to remain anonymous on the web to guard their personal identities and data from outside parties.
'If you make (the bad stuff) illegal, suddenly the phone is all good stuff,' he said.
I asked Berners-Lee about the situation in the Eurozone, and how the Europeans are doing on tech development.
He was optimistic.
He also pointed out that his early work was done at CERN in the European Union, and not on the British mainland.
He pointed to areas like Barcelona and other EU cities where tech hubs are evolving.
'People gravitate towards our company, Inrupt, because they are passionate about what we do,' he said. 'And we find that in Germany, we've got Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, also people, even in England.'
In terms of the opportunity for today's young career professionals, he noted how his own work was based on an employer, giving him permission to innovate.
By the same token, he said, today's companies should give those young people in their ranks the ability to disrupt, and see what happens.
All of this was illuminating as we look at interacting with our community on where technology is going.
Things are happening at lightning speed again – we have the actual evolution of digital sentience and everything that entails, and a lot of times, it's simply bewildering. But we can get guidance from these past innovators, who did so much in the days before AI, to think about how to keep incorporating new technologies into our lives.
I'm going to continue bringing the latest headlines from the tech world as we move through 2025, which we all see as an inflection point for media, for business, and frankly speaking, for life.