The web has gone off course, but now it’s meeting its maker.
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989, he had imagined something open, universal, and free. A shared space open to anyone, without permission or paywalls. Today, more than 5.5 billion people rely on the web, but its creator fears it has drifted far from its original promise.
Speaking to The Guardian, Berners-Lee said he believes the internet is now locked in a “battle for the soul of the web” that will determine whether it remains a force for good or continues moving toward manipulation and control.
Promoting his new book, “This Is for Everyone,” the British computer scientist reflected on the optimism of the web’s early days, when collaboration and curiosity drove its innovation. Back then, he says, his excitement was “uncontainable.” Now, nearly four decades later, that excitement has been replaced by anxiety and urgency.
“We can fix the internet … it’s not too late,” he writes, framing his latest efforts as a rebellion led by developers, activists, and technologists who believe the web can once again serve the public good, but only if its underlying incentives are changed.
Where the web went wrong
According to Berners-Lee, the first major issue occurred in the 1990s with the commercialization of the Domain Name System. What he argues should have been run as a nonprofit public utility was instead overtaken by profit-seeking actors during the dot-com boom, turning it into fertile ground for speculators and opportunists. “The Americans were very keen about commercialising the internet,” he told Guardian Australia, describing the shift from an academic tool to a commercial battleground.
Profit quickly became the driving force behind online design, and the long-term consequences became undeniable in 2016, when online disinformation and manipulation played a visible role in the US election. Two years later, Berners-Lee told Vanity Fair he was “devastated” by the harm his invention had helped enable.
The corner of the web ‘optimised for nastiness’
In a 2024 blog post, Berners-Lee mapped the internet’s benefits and harms, illustrating both its extraordinary usefulness and its growing dangers. Most of it, he argues, is still overwhelmingly positive.
But while the majority of the internet supports communication, creativity, and collaboration, Berners-Lee calls attention to a smaller but powerful cluster of platforms, including X, Snapchat, and YouTube, that he says has been “optimised for nastiness.” These services rely heavily on engagement-driven algorithms that reward outrage, addiction, and polarization, leading to disinformation and declining mental health.
Although this corner represents only a fraction of the web, Berners-Lee notes that people spend disproportionate amounts of time there precisely because the systems are made to be addictive.
The idea that technology is neutral, he argues, simply isn’t true. Platforms are designed to shape behaviour. By prioritizing engagement at all costs, you end up amplifying outrage and division.
Reclaiming data control for users
Another major problem, Berners-Lee says, is monopolisation. A small number of tech giants, such as Google and Meta, currently dominate the market and control vast amounts of personal data in closed systems that are neither transparent nor interoperable. That concentration of power is harmful to both innovation and for users.
His response is a project called Solid, a new way of structuring the web that puts individuals back in charge of their data, how it is stored, and how it is shared online. Instead of platforms owning everything, individuals would control personal “pods” of data, likened to digital backpacks.
Governments are already experimenting with the idea. In Belgium’s Flanders region, data is treated as a public utility, with citizens using Solid pods to manage personal information.
Berners-Lee believes such systems could eventually render today’s social media platforms obsolete by allowing for healthier, more collaborative online communities driven by user empowerment rather than surveillance.
AI worries
When it comes to AI, though, Berners-Lee’s optimism dims. AI, he says, owes its existence to the web’s vast data troves but is now advancing too quickly inside corporate silos, with little oversight. “The horse is bolting,” he warns.
His solution is a global, nonprofit research institution, a “CERN for AI,” where scientists could collaboratively build and contain advanced systems safely and transparently. However, he admits that right now we are “very, very far from” that. “I don’t see a way that we can get to a point where the scientific community gets to look at the AI and to decide whether it is safe or not,” he says.
Whether this cooperation would be possible is yet to be seen. For Berners-Lee, the future of both the web and AI depends on whether humanity is willing to redesign its most powerful technologies from purely commercial interests to ones that have compassion, transparency, and shared responsibility at their core.
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