This is my reaction to Timbl's new book [Tim Berners-Lee with Stephen Witt, This is for Everyone, Macmillan, 2025].
First, my quibbles. I've put them first because some of them affect my overall impression. But don't be put off: the book is well worth your time.
p.37 amusingly describes me as "blond", which might have been accurate until I was about three years old, but in 1980 my hair was definitely brown. This really doesn't bother me, but is an indicator of poor fact-checking.
p.40 is unclear about the fate of the "Enquire" floppy disk. I have no recollection of having a summer student or other visitor evaluate it, but it's quite plausible. However, we already had a considerable investment in documentation software (Robert Cailliau's "Report" program). Also, the simple VDUs of the 1980s really didn't make on-line documentation a serious option, with or without hyperlinks. If Tim had read my published memoir, he'd know what happened to the floppy:
"Tim wrote a hypertext system for the NORD-10, going by the name of Enquire. It worked well, although I found it rather like playing the then popular game of Adventure, in which you wandered blindly in a maze and encountered monsters. However, Tim’s contract at CERN soon ended. Robert and I were sorry to see him go, since he’d livened up the place. The 9-in. [sic] floppy disk containing the code for Enquire ended up in a drawer in my desk and was eventually overwritten when we ran out of spare disks one day." [Brian E. Carpenter, Network Geeks - How they Built the Internet, Copernicus Books, 2013]
One omission around page 40 is that, to the best of my knowledge, Tim first learnt of three important ideas during his stint at the CERN PS in 1980: document markup (Cailliau's Report program); remote execution of source code (George Shering's Nodal language); Remote Procedure Calls ( in Cailliau's P+ language). At the same time, he introduced Robert and me to the concept of hyperlinks, years before Apple's HyperCard appeared.
By the way, it seems that a very early implementation of hyperlinks on a distributed system was the Scrapbook system at the UK National Physical Laboratory in the early 1970s. As it happens, I interviewed one of its implementors a few years ago: An Overseas Experience with Hypertext and Packet Switching. They even had angle brackets in their hyperlink syntax, years before SGML adopted them.
p.94 describes the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a "non-profit". This is imprecise. The IETF itself isn't incorporated in any way and has no formal membership model. It's loosely associated with the Internet Society, which is a non-profit under US law. It's supported technically by something called IETF Administration LLC, which is another non-profit under US law, but the IETF itself is just a group of people who've chosen to collaborate voluntarily. The W3C is a much more corporate model, largely because Tim didn't like the IETF model of rough consensus, especially when he didn't agree with it. To this day Tim dislikes the fact that the rough consensus was to say "Uniform Resource Locator" (instead of his preferred "Universal"). [RFC 1738, published December 1994]
p.115 ff skirts over an issue that struck some of us at time (including Mike Sendall and Pier Giorgio Innocenti, i.e. the responsible CERN managers) as very dubious. Michael Dertouzos of MIT, godfather of the W3C consortium, was an old pal of George Metakides, a senior official of the European Commission (both were Greco-American and they had first met at MIT). In December 1994, there was a very fraught meeting at the EC headquarters in Brussels, where there was no agreement about how a transatlantic W3C with funding from both the US government and the EC would work. As it happened, I had a meeting in Brussels the same day, about some aspect of growing the Internet in Europe (we network geeks were quite concerned by the ridiculous rate of traffic growth caused by the Web). I bumped into the CERN Web delegation in the departure lounge at Zaventem airport, since we were all on the same flight back to Geneva. They were all (except, perhaps, Tim) in a state of mild shock about a proposal which amounted to CERN becoming a staging post for EC cash being used to subsidise an organisation almost entirely based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. CERN could hardly get into the business of such de facto money laundering. In the end, CERN kept out of the W3C except as a regular member organisation, and left the funding arrangements to the EC and France's INRIA lab.
A much more politically correct description of this affair can be found in Robert Cailliau's book [James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web was Born, OUP, 2000]. In fact, if you want to know the fully detailed early history of the Web, I strongly recommend this book.
p.127 implies that HTTP is a W3C standard. It isn't. It's an IETF standard. See RFC 9110 for the latest, shiniest version.
p.167 gives a very superficial and approximate treatment of DNS "privatisation" (no mention of ICANN, Vice-President Al Gore and his sidekick Ira Magaziner, .com was not "auctioned off" in "early 1990s", etc.) This matters because the privatisation steps taken by the Clinton Administration, mainly dictated by Magaziner, intentionally led to the tenets of neo-liberal capitalism being applied to the Internet (and, as a result, to the Web). In fact the woes that Tim spends several later chapters on all flowed directly from this. As I say from time to time to people complaining about some Wild West activity or other on the Internet: "Welcome to capitalism!" It all flows from Magaziner. (He failed to reform US health care along with Hillary Clinton, but unfortunately succeeded with the Internet.)
p.184 mentions the first IP address in China. It's true that the first formal allocation was to the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in 1994. But Chinese academics had email access long before that (1987 says Wikipedia). Hong Kong had IP addresses in 1991. To put this in context, CERN only acquired global IP addresses in 1989. China was also using both X.25 and DECnet connectivity in 1989 [When did China access the Internet?]. There was nothing unusual in China "joining" in 1994.
p.286. Ben Segal did not "convince CERN to adopt the global Internet Protocol standard". Actually, I took that decision when OSI software failed to materialise. I gave the late John Gamble the job of converting CERN to officially allocated global IP address space; as just mentioned that was in 1989. What Ben did do was first install TCP/IP locally at CERN, since it was the best available networking solution for UNIX-based systems - but unfortunately he did that using "borrowed" IP address space, which is why John had to manage the changeover to official addresses a few years later. That was happening exactly when Tim wrote his first WWW proposal: Tim chose the Internet in the same year that my group connected CERN to it.
p.304 describes WebRTC (2011-2017) as a W3C effort. In fact, it necessitated a major joint IETF/W3C effort, which produced 15 IETF RFCs over 2015-2021, to make it work properly over the Internet. The W3C has always left all actual networking stuff to the IETF, like the HTTP protocol itself.
That's the end of my quibbles. The book as a whole is challenging to sum up; you need to read it for yourself. As noted above, the historical aspect would have benefitted from more fact-checking and maybe some friendly in-depth review. But the discussions towards the end about misuse of the Web, personal data privacy, and the threats and promises of AI that outstrips human intelligence, are very important. I and many others share the view that AI will overtake human IQ very soon, unless somebody switches off Moore's law right away. (It is alleged by Google's AI that Moore's Law for AI has a doubling time of about 7 months in early 2026.) Being attacked by AI in the interests of selfish capitalism is not a good future.
I have no idea whether Tim's idea of a genuine personal privacy wallet will succeed. If it does so, it will be against the selfish interest of all the major corporations involved in the enshittification of the Web [Watch this.]. (Amusingly enough, that video itself has been censored - every spoken instance of the syllable "shit" has been silenced.) As Cory Doctorow concludes "Finally, the platform abuses both users and business customers, keeping most of the value for itself." To help the process along, big companies have learned how to lobby politicians when any attempt at improved regulation threatens their business model. Are we there yet? Welcome to capitalism!
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