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The Internet is broken and the inventor of the World Wide Web wants to fix it

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Abstract

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2025) The World Wide Web is one of those rare innovations that truly reshaped the world. In it, social media would be designed to maximize the joy" the user experiences instead of fuelling division, and technical standards would be introduced to prevent the mistakes of the social-media era from being repeated in the age of artificial intelligence. This fight over standards is comparable to his earlier run-ins with the creators of the Mosaic browser, including entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, whose profit-driven vision for the web clashed with Berners-Lee's original ideal of a distributed, decentralized and open system. Berners-Lee seems to have a grudging admiration for Andreessen's success in commercializing early web browsing by ignoring the niceties of the online community that had been the norm until this point."
Key Data

  • Publication Date
    24 November 2025
  • Primary Author
    Chris Stokel-Walker
  • Source
    Nature
  • Language
    English
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