How the web lost its innocence

And how it could return to its original egalitarian goals

It all started in 1989 with an inter-office memo, describing in very humble words a “…way to link and access information of various kinds… in which the user can browse at will. [through] a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help…” That was Tim Berners Lee, an Englishman and his colleague, R Cailliau, working at the CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located just outside Geneva. After describing some of the technical aspects, it proposed its ends with the goal “to provide the software for the above free of charge to