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Intelligence Squared
Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the Internet, AI and the Future of Humanity (Part One)
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
There.
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Producer Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with Sir Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Born in the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Berners Lee famously shared his invention, the World Wide Web, for no commercial reward. Its widespread adoption changed everything, transforming humanity into the first digital suite species. In September, he came to the Intelligence Squared stage with broadcaster Tanya Breyer to tell the story of his iconic invention and explore the future of human innovation. Drawing on his new memoir, this Is For Everyone, Berners Lee discussed AI, the Internet and the future of Humanity live at Cadogan hall in London. In the spirit of Sir Tim's invention, we're also making the video from the Event free and available to all. You can find the link in the episode description where you can also find the episode transcription. Let's join our host, Tanya Breyer now with more.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Well, what an absolute delight to be here. Thank you so much for all making it through the tube strike. And it's my absolute honor to introduce our special guest, the incredible, the extraordinary Sir Tim Berners Lee, of course, inventor of the World wide web in 1989. Since then, through the work with the World Wide Web Consortium, the Open Data Institute, the World Wide Web foundation, the development of the Solid Protocol, and now as CTO and co founder of inrupt, he has been a tireless advocate for for shared standards, open Web access for all and the power of individuals on the web. Of course, he's been given many awards, many accolades. And in 2004, her late queen Elizabeth the Majesty the Queen knighted Sir Tim and you were also appointed to the Order of Merit by Her Majesty as well. Today, please join me in welcoming Sir Tim Berners Lee.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Thank you all for coming.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Well, it's wonderful to see you here. And of course, this today marks the launch, the publication of your memoir. This is for everyone. Tim, why did you feel that it was the right time now for your memoir?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, I haven't written the book since many years ago and a lot has happened, so I felt it was important to tell a story. But also I feel the web is a situation where we really want to put some opinion in about it, about the future. I want to stake a course from where we are now to a better future than the one we're in now.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Yes. And I know we're going to talk a lot about that a little bit later on. But first of all, what was the experience like for you actually writing the memoir? What was it like to relive the extraordinary path that you've had so far?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, it's been really quite moving at times to go back over all the history, some of the family history, some of the personal history, the colleagues remembering funny stories of colleagues interactions interacting and so on in the web consortium. And so it's been, yeah, it's been quite moving.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Has it been cathartic for you, do you think?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Yes, I think a bit, a bit cathartic that being able to go over to a certain extent, get everything in order as well, get to remember all of the times we went to Africa and what all they happened in and and so on. So getting that sort of thing sorted out I think is good.
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Host Tanya Breyer
And of course more than, well, at 36 years on could you ever have imagined the impact of creating one of the world's most successful world changing inventions ever made?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, so yes and no, because the fact that it. No, of course, when I was developing the thing at cern, I couldn't imagine that it would get to this state, it would cover the world like this. But on the other hand, even in the early days, it was ticking off exponentially. And so because it was ticking off exponentially, then you realize that if it's going to go on as it's done for this last three years, for example, for another seven years, then you do the math and you realize it's going to be big.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Yeah, of course. And how close do you think the World wide web in 2025 is to your original vision? What do you think have been some of the most significant changes over the years?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
So while the original web was quite a simple static web, you had web pages linking to each other that was web bundled over, sometimes we call it Web 2.0 was when web pages were actually dynamic and so you'd find your way around things like Google Maps or the web became more powerful. But then, now we're in a situation where people aren't making their own websites. A lot of people on Facebook and so it's not the same as it was neon.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Well, of course we are in the midst of what you're talking about, the AI tech revolution. Do you see any comparison comparisons, Tim, and how that's unfolding now and has unfolded to your own experience at the beginning of the web?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
I think in some ways in which, yes it really you can see the excitement, the exponential growth, rate of growth. Some things are similar, some things are very different. There's no wtc, as I call it, consortium of AI people making them all sort of work together. Each of the AI companies is going hell for leather for the prize and really trying to get there first rather than work with other people. So there isn't so much. We had a lot of collaboration around the web, which was great. I don't see that the same way for AI.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Well, if you don't mind, Tim, I'm going to take you back to where it all began for you. You were born in York, New 1955, the same year as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, which looking back is quite an amazing cohort of tech leaders there. How would you describe the young Tim? You were brought up, I believe in Yixin. Your parents, Mary Lee and Conway, they were both mathematicians and electronic engineers. What sort of values did they teach you and your Siblings growing up.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, I think math. Math, math. So they were both mathematicians and they met building the first computer. The first. When the time the idea of what a computer was. Alan Turing was sort of philosophically defining what a computer was and it wasn't. So those are very exciting days. And for them, for mom and dad, they were remarkable people, but also they were a remarkable time. They were very lucky to be in that team on that tin hut along the side of the Franti factory building. So I think that was. They were very lucky and they passed on that excitement with mathematics and computers to us kids.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Well, what was the household like? I believe that you. There was no pop culture, no television. You didn't know who Bruce Springsteen was till the tender age of 53. But I know, don't tell Bruce, please. But there was something very special that was within the household. And actually we've got it here tonight. It's amazing. It's a book that was very significant for you and if I can very carefully, I hope carefully pick it up because I know that this is very, very precious and this has come out of the safe. Tim Inquire Within Upon Everything.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
So that book was in the big bookshelf in front of just. Even the title was intriguing. In fact, inside it reckoned each edition tried to answer all of the questions that any household might have about whether how to cook something or how to fix something. And it was sort of just this idea that you could inquire within upon everything itself was kind of was a crazy idea. And of course they had to keep producing new versions, but each year. But there's the idea of it and the name I actually used later on for a program that I wrote, one of the sort of phases of thinking about which would end up leading to the web. I called the program Inquire Within.
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Host Tanya Breyer
And how much do you think that sort of childhood impacted on what you went on to do?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
I think that the childhood like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I was lucky that just as I was getting interested in physics, you could use your physics to make an electromagnet with nails and wire. And that's allowance in principle, to make a little. You could make a little thing that would store one bit of information, in fact we call it now, but. And it would be as big as a nail. But then as we grew up, then the transistor was invented, just the right time when I was getting interested in electronics, then the transistor was invented. So confuses the mum and dad building. Instead of being made out of old vacuum Tubes and so on, they started to be made out of transistors and transistors got smaller and smaller and smaller. And so just at the time when I wanted to build up my own computer, then I could get a whole chip full of transistors on a 2 inch long circuit and which I could then solder into my computer. So that I think the fact that my cohort, people born in 1955 had the benefit of being able to see what a computer was to building their own computer and people beforehand didn't have the power, there were no transistors. People afterwards, they take it all for granted, they just are given a phone or a computer.
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Host Tanya Breyer
So that was definitely the year to be born. It sounds like Tim. And of course after achieving, achieving very strong results and building your own computers there, when you're at secondary school, at Emmanuel School, I believe it was, in London, you had the opportunity to go and study at Oxford. But there's something in the book that says rather than your great knowledge of maths and physics, it may have been your taste in fashion that had an influence of you getting into to Oxford. Can you tell us about that?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, I was nerdy, very unfashionable and terrified about going to Oxford for the interview. So I imagined I went down to the shops probably in Kingston and looked around for something to wear for the interview. And so I. I had some sort of a brownish cord jacket, I had sort of brown trousers and brownish green cord jacket and I had a white yellow shirt and I had some sort of tie. And then. So there I am in Queens College and I'm going to the. And I'm finding the room for the interview. The from where my supervisor to be was in and knocked on the door and he opened the door and Professor John Moffat was wearing exactly the same thing. Very cringy moment. Right.
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Host Tanya Breyer
I think that's wonderful. Do you think he thought you'd done it on purpose?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
I thought, well okay, I might not be a professor but I can Play 1 on TV.
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Host Tanya Breyer
What was your experience like there at Oxford?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Oh, absolutely lovely. The punting, the intellectual discussions into the small hours, the wandering picnics in university parks. The punting. The punting. The punting music.
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Host Tanya Breyer
You like the punting.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
So Oxford was a wonderful three years.
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Host Tanya Breyer
And there was also a wonderful story how you celebrated when you left. You went on top of a roof and what did you do there?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, we had to. We left a piece of garment. I'm not sure how much I put into the. We left a garment on the Queen's college clock. So you have, for that you had to climb up above all the various layers of the college. And then there's a clock tower. And on the front of the clock tower is this clock. So we decorated it with some underwear, which caused the clock to actually snag. And so we had to pay for repair of the clock. So it's. So that was how we celebrated having got through the three years.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Fantastic. Now we know where it all comes from, don't we? Well, after your studies, you worked at Plessy, one of the big three UK telecommunications companies at the time. And then you went on to work at CERN in Switzerland, known as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, also the European Organization for Nuclear Research. You started with just six months there at first. Tim, what was that like for you?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Ooh, this electronics sort of kid from England getting a chance to work in Switzerland, live in Geneva. So there was a hangout with all these visitors from different parts of the world in this high energy physics lab. That was really exciting. So we were there for six months. During that time, we thought we'd done Geneva. We learned to ski in the winter, we learned to windsurf in the summer. So we felt that we were really like total expat physicists. And after six months. But it was. Well, CERN is a wonderful place. If you get a chance to go there, go there.
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Host Tanya Breyer
You went back there a few years later, didn't you, for a fellowship. But I believe that there was a certain coffee machine that played a very important part.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, the coffee machine was an important part because both times the coffee machine was a coffee. There was a coffee area where you could go along and the various, the main corridors of the photon synchrotron division met at this pace. And so if you had a coffee there, you could grab a coffee, grab a croissant course, and then you could pick out of the flow of people going by the people you wanted to talk to and ask them how their bit of equipment works. Because there's documentation about how people brought all these pieces of equipment from different parts of the world. They spoke different languages, and also the computers spoke different languages. So if you wanted to interface one piece of kit that you were building to them, really the coffee area turned out to be really important because you could grab anybody out of the flow and ask them about it, and they would then tell you who you should probably talk to about that and then again pass you on somebody else.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Yes. So how did that experience. And then when you were there for your fellowship, actually then make you develop the idea for the Web.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, CERN clearly needed the Web because they had to rely on this coffee area. They had to rely on some documentation. They had lots of people, lots of people written different documentation systems. And so one of the things which I noticed is that each person would bring their own computer, type of computer for their own part of the CERN system, the CERN great experiment. And when they bring it, they typically write up all of the details about how the system works in their own personal language. They also, sometimes they make their own computer, they make their own documentation system just in order to keep all that information for themselves. Let's learn from other people. And so all these documentation systems didn't talk to each other. But I also noticed that when they tried to persuade other people to use the documentation system, then they go on stage, talk to a group of people, and they'd say, here's documentation system. We should all use it. To use it, you have to put your data on the IBM. And then they could see in the audience most of the people didn't use the IBM. So most of the people would use a different computer system. Or they, you know, they. So what they. What they did, each of these systems that they invent would be very specific to a particular type of document. And so I knew that if the Web, I knew that the Web would have to be universal. So that's where the idea of being a universal space came from.
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Host Tanya Breyer
And what was the initial reaction like from your colleagues? Again, there's a story you tell in the book about your friend Meryl, and you go skiing with Meryl, and you're actually trying to draw it out for her with a ski pole.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
She remembers me drawing the web as a diagram in the snow. Yes. So I don't know whether she actually got the point, but I think she understood how important it was to me. And then after a while, maybe the ski pole drawings got more and more explicit, and maybe I got better at drawing the drawings in the snow and frustrating people. What the Web was.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Well, Meryl and the ski pole are forever in the book, Tim. And of course, in March 1989, when you first submitted the memo for the idea of the World Wide Web to your bosses at cern, what was their first initial reaction?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
So initially, I wrote a memo about it in 1989, and then. And I passed, and I. Because somebody said, you know this. You keep talking coffee, you keep talking to me about this hypertext thing, so why don't you write it up? So I wrote it up, and Then a year later, I asked them again, you know, what should I do about the hypertext thing? And they said, well, you should write a memo about it. And I said, well. But actually I did. So they said, well, send it to me. So I said, okay, I'll send it again. So I actually put two dates, March 1989, comma, May 1990, on the top of the memo. So just to rub it in, you have seen this before. So you can't blame CERN, really, because CERN was a place for doing physics experiments. This was not a physics experiment. So CERN didn't really have any place where I could go to saying, I want to make. Where is the place where we get funding for global hypertext projects? But what happened was, in fact, Mike Sendal, my boss's boss, Peggy was my boss, and Mike Sendal was her boss. And he seemed to have liked the idea. And he told me that he said, you know, we should get hold of next the computer, because he wanted to use the next computer. Steve Jobs had just left Apple to produce, to go and make the next computer. So he said, well, okay, I give in. You can get. You can buy a next computer. And your excuse will be just to kick the tires on this next computer, why don't you develop that thing that you've always been talking about, that hypertext thing, with a twinkle in his eye.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Thank goodness for him.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
So it turned out that unfortunately, Mike died around 10 years later. But when Peggy eventually came across his copy of the memo, he'd written in the corner in pencil, vague but exciting. Fortunately, not exciting but vague. Otherwise, he'd fallen into.
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Host Tanya Breyer
How did the CERN phone book play a part? Because that also did.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
I had to get somebody to use this Web thing. And so. But it turned out that the CERN IT people had a problem at the time that they. Well, the CERN phone book was a physical thing, but they had an online version which everybody used on the mainframe for people logged into the IBM mainframe sometimes only to use the phone book. So that was a bit silly because they had lots of different type of. They had lots of UNIX machines, they had lots of VAX, VMS computers, HP computers. So there are lots of different types of computer, lots of UNIX machines. Why should they have to log into the main. This IBM mainframe just to be able to get the phone book? So the guy maintained phone book on the computer, was given the task of getting it to run on everywhere else. And so he used the Web for that. He just gave people a very, very simple web browser, a line mode one where you'd just type in. You could type in phone and a name and it would print out a list of but it was actually he was using the web and so that was the. That was the second web server, if you like.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Tim it wasn't always called the web. You had come up with other names. Can you share the initial name you came up with?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, I called it the Mesh, but I had a few names. Well, one was the information mine, but that would be, that would be Tim, which was a little bit egotistical or mine of information would be moi, which may be even more egotistical. So moi Tim Mesh was what I called it for the but eventually I decided that WWW it had to be WWW because WS were rare. Nobody else had think there were going to be no more projects called www. If you put a computer on the web and you called it www.it's probably going to be pretty clear that it was running a web server.
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Host Tanya Breyer
You mentioned Steve Jobs.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
People complained that WWW is more longer to serve than woah woah woah. So that's.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Well, what did they know?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
So the acronym was longer than the word itself.
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- [29:34]
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
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- [29:53]
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- [29:54]
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
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- [30:05]
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Host Tanya Breyer
Well, talking about Steve Jobs and how important it was because of his next computer at the time, there was almost a moment where you did meet him in Paris and you write about this in the book book, what happened?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
So yeah, almost there was a meeting in France of people who had projects on the necks and we were invited. So the worldwide project was invited. And so we went along and they had a neck for us to demo straight. They had a row of necks. Everybody had a table. And so we had the world over project all running and Steve Jobs came into the room and he came and looked at, had little chats with each of the people and he came all the way around the room till he got almost to us and then he was called away on business.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Oh no.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
So we missed him. So I got that close to him. But that was yeah, who knows? I do wonder if I feel if he had seen the World Wide Web then I think he would have got it because he talked about the next computer being not a personal computer but an interpersonal computer. And so I think he would have got it and maybe he would have seized on the web as being a way to achieve his dreams of the next being what it did. But that isn't the way it went.
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Host Tanya Breyer
One of those sliding doors moments I think. What are your thoughts thoughts on the dominance of Apple's products and software today under Tim Cook?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
So now we have Apple. So it's nice that the next machine that I developed the web on is now basically it's now that chain of development has led to Apple. So Apple to a certain extent is great for me to use because it reminds me of that that old exposure sheet. The question is what do I think about dominance of Apple? So in general I feel that the dominance of monopolies, any monopoly, it's always bad for business, it's always bad for new companies, it's bad for innovation. So yeah, when Apple is the only company making phones, then all of the smarts about how to make new phones has to happen in Apple Labs, which is just as all of the. When AT and T was a monopoly telephone supplier, all the smarts about telephones had to be developed at&t DAB so on and so on. In general, when you have a monopoly, it's not good for innovation.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Well, you've always said from the very beginning, Tim, that your mission is, has always been about keeping the web open source, transparent and freely accessible. I want to ask you why that was so important to you at the beginning and how easy was it to convince CERN to publish and relinquish the IP, which they did in 1993.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
They did, yes. Robert Caillou and I both, we were the two people working on the web front. We spent time lobbying the CERN community while lobbying the CERN directorate. We had to get somebody at a sufficiently high level and eventually we ended up with a commitment from CERN signed and stamped by a director saying this is to commit that CERN won't charge royalties on the worldwide web tip technology. And so that was really, really important for its take up. There was a project like the web called Gopher which in fact crashed at that point because more or less, I think people avoided it because it wasn't free. The University of Minnesota who ran the Gopher project said if you are using it in future, not now, for now it's free, but in future potential, potentially we could charge you royalties. And so people ran screaming away from work Gopher and demanded the web be free.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Have you ever regretted that decision? Looking back?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Not at all. Because I know that if it had been for free, if it hadn't been for free, people would have gone off and they wouldn't have used it. We wouldn't be talking about it now.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Well, of course you moved from CERN to, to MIT in America. And at that time things were changing with the Web. Why did you feel it was necessary to go to America? What was that experience like? And you also established the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C as it's known.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
So when I was developing the web in Genea, I was using the Internet, but I was one of the few people to use the Internet in all of Europe. So because the Internet was developed in the US and for 20 years it spread through US universities. So universities were sending people email using Internet protocols. And so once the web was out there it immediately spread through the US world academic world. So dam ended. The center of gravity of the world was immediately in the US So I had to really move to the US in order to be able to keep, to be able to manage it, to be able to make. So we said yes. We started the consortium WTC where Michael de Tuzos and Alvesa at MIT were there. They knew how to start run a consortium. They'd run one or two consortiums already. So they knew how they could knew how to get industry around the table agreeing on one standard when each of these at the time it was very cutthroat. There was the battle of the wars. Netscape and Microsoft were fighting about which version of HTML to use and people were making HTTP space and smarter and everything. But it was really, really important to keep one web. And fortunately they got it. These people who came to the standards meetings, they got it. So they all sat around the table and agreed on one set of standards.
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Host Tanya Breyer
Wow, it's amazing you got them to agree.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, they realized sometimes they would have to go back home and explain to or they'd have to go back and explain. They're also the station IBM had to go and persuade some division that wanted to charge royalties on all kinds of patents around to say no, no, it's royalty free space. So CERN made it royalty free also the companies had to make it royalty free as well. I think what they realize is if we fight too much over our share of this cake, then the cake will be smaller if we let the cake, if we don't, if we let it be royalty free then the cake will be huge. So our share of the cake will be huge.
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Host Tanya Breyer
But not everyone obviously felt that way Tim and by the mid-1990s it had become obvious that fortunes were going to be made on the web. What were the first signs for you of commercialization creeping in and the impact that it's had?
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, when it so kept in I thought I welcomed people buying and selling things on the web. The Riley there was a whole Internet catalog which the O'Reilly company were I think they said they had the first web ad that you could click on. They had magazines, they had a set of magazines about and they had online magazines and in the online magazines they had web advertisements. And so web advertisements by themselves weren't a bad thing. They allowed people to monetize their own, their blogs for example. So really wasn't until targeted advertising of much later on when the targeting on Facebook becomes much more focused and stronger and starts to manipulate elections. Really those sort of issues?
- [39:12]
Host Tanya Breyer
Well of course in the book you talk about the harmful third party cookies which can actually track activity on the web and gather our data. Who do you hold responsible for how that side of the web started to actually develop?
- [39:31]
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Well, Netscape originally developed the idea of a cookie and then after a while the cookies became sort of ubiquitous because the web was designed to not store it really so that you couldn't there would be no concept of where you were in the web. Each web page originally without cookies, each web page without would be just individual sort of fetch without any context. Cookies allowed the context so they allowed e commerce and lots of really important applications.
- [40:08]
Producer Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode's produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. Become a member@intelligencesquared.com and to join us at future live events, head to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks so much for joining us.
- [40:52]
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- [40:57]
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
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