The man who gave us the Web, and never claimed it

In an age when every click, every connection, and every emotion can be monetised, it feels almost unbelievable that the World Wide Web, the very architecture of our digital lives, was created by someone who gave it away for free. That someone was Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Born in the same year as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Berners-Lee belonged to the same generation of pioneers who reshaped the modern world. But unlike them, he took a radically different path. He famously distributed his innovation without seeking commercial reward. As the web rapidly gained users around the world, Berners-Lee focused on building its governance, developing the foundational protocols of HTML, HTTP, and the URL. His goal was to unleash creativity and collaboration for the benefit of all a goal he continues to pursue today. Reading his book This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web (his speech at the opening ceremony of 2012 Olympic Games was the same title!) and listening to his conversation with Thomas Friedman (at Keplers Bookstore in Menlo Park), I was reminded that behind every great invention lies both intellect and intent. What makes Berners-Lee extraordinary is he built the web to make it open, accessible, and free for everyone. When Friedman asked him how he imagined the web when he built it, Berners-Lee replied that he wanted a universal space where anyone could share knowledge without hierarchy or permission. He didnt picture users or consumers only people. Friedman called this the moral imagination of technology the ability to think not only of what we can build, but what we should. In a world that rewards speed, scale, and profit, Berners-Lee chose patience, principle, and public good. That decision set him apart not just from his peers, but from the very logic of technological capitalism that came after him. From the very beginning, he envisioned a system that was simple, open, and universal. He created the Universal Document Identifier what we now call a URL a solution that allowed anyone, anywhere, to link to any document. Its simplicity was its genius, enabling the web to grow exponentially, multiplying tenfold every year. He didnt patent it, didnt corral it within pay-walls, and didnt build a billion-dollar empire from it. Instead he ensured that the web remained a public commons, not a privatised playground for corporations. Berners-Lee often describes the web as a mine of information, though he jokes that worldwide mess might be more accurate at times. He is painfully aware of the systematic erosion of his ideal. Today, the very platform he created has been transformed into a marketplace where data is currency and attention is the most traded commodity. Cookies, once designed as conveniences, became tools for surveillance. Social media, initially a means of connection, turned into machinery for addiction and manipulation. He worries about artificial intelligence too. Through it all, Berners-Lees humanism shines through. He grew up in a loving home, raised by parents who themselves had worked on the earliest computers. He was nurtured in optimism and collaboration, values that became the DNA of the web. He often points to open-source communities as the living expression of that spirit: people from all over the world, working together selflessly, creating something larger than themselves. Berners-Lee has never wavered in his vision of a web that belongs to everyone, and he is still working quietly on reimagining it. Through his latest initiative, Solid, he is trying to give people control of their own data to restore the webs original promise of trust, privacy, and agency. Your data should be yours, he insists. That statement sounds almost self-evident, and yet it runs counter to nearly every digital system we live within today. His philosophy echoes that of the early scientists and thinkers who saw knowledge as a shared inheritance, not a private asset. Thomas Friedman often says, The world is flat, meaning technology has connected us in unprecedented ways. But listening to Berners-Lee, I was struck by another truth: the world may be connected, but connection without compassion can flatten the human spirit. The web was never meant to divide or distort; it was meant to deepen our understanding of one another. Today, every message we send, every page we read, every connection we make online traces back to that single act of generosity: a man who could have claimed the world, and instead, offered it freely. Perhaps that is the truest measure of greatness not how much we build, but how much we give away. (The writers views are personal)