Author: Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Reading time: 22 minutes
Synopsis
This Is for Everyone (2025) explains how one man’s simple idea at CERN became the World Wide Web that connects us all today. It talks about the first internet browser fights and also bigger discussions about privacy, social media, and AI. The book shows that the web’s open nature was both its strongest point and its weakest point. It also suggests a better future – a web that can truly help people and build trust again.
What will you learn? Find out what the inventor of the World Wide Web thinks about today’s internet.
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web wanting no single person or company in charge. He wanted it to be like the human mind, where ideas connect naturally, not in a straight line. But over the years, a few big companies started to control more and more of the web. A small number of technology giants are fighting for power, and people say these companies have too much control. Their main way of making money is by keeping you online and watching ads. All of this has made the internet a place where people disagree a lot and get addicted. This was not at all what Tim Berners-Lee wanted.
The author imagined the web as a place for solving problems with purpose, not just for grabbing attention. It was a tool for bringing ideas together to find answers. It was about creating things that help people, not control them. In this summary, we’ll explore this idea. We’ll see how the web was made and how it might again be used to serve humanity, not the other way around.
Blink 1 – A family of engineers
Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, England, in 1955. This was a lucky year for technology, as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were also born then. It was not just a chance. Being born at this time put them in the right place at the right time to lead new technology.
Berners-Lee also had the extra benefit of having two parents who were mathematicians and electronic engineers. He was the eldest of four children. So, he grew up in a home where thinking, asking questions, and being creative were important. His parents had worked at Ferranti, a British company that built the first computers for businesses. From the start, they often talked about logic, puzzles, numbers, and computer parts. The world of computers was still small then. His parents actually knew Alan Turing, the quiet genius who broke the German secret code during World War II. Turing’s ideas about computing and logic were still talked about at Ferranti, where he once tried to teach an early computer to play chess. His work and his friendship influenced the Berners-Lee family, and through them, Tim himself.
At school, Tim liked mathematics and science fiction. He loved books by Asimov and Heinlein very much. He dreamed of worlds far away, created with logic and computer code. His early teachers helped him love solving problems and see the simple beauty of math.
His learning continued at home. His father showed him how logic gates work using water jets. This was like a real, liquid example of how computers think. He first loved making things with model train switches and simple walkie-talkies. This love grew when he went to Oxford to study physics. There, he built his own computer screen from a broken television, an old adding machine, and a bunch of homemade parts. His excitement was met by the patient university engineers. They agreed to let him connect his creation to their small computer. It worked!
By the time he finished university, Berners-Lee had made a computer from old, thrown-away parts and got a very good degree. As he started his career, he was sure he would work with computers a lot more.
Blink 2 – A perfect environment for invention
Berners-Lee arrived in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1980. He went to work at CERN, which was the European Council for Nuclear Research at the time. He found himself in a place that looked like a science museum and also a secret hideout: concrete halls, underground tunnels, and machines that threw tiny particles like race cars.
He was hired to be part of a team. Their job was to improve the control system for a particle accelerator called the Proton Synchrotron Booster. This meant changing many physical buttons and screens to computer programs and simple computer screens. He enjoyed the challenge, even as the room became darker, with only the soft glow of computer screens.
But the real lesson at CERN was not about machines, but about people. People at CERN learned and shared ideas over coffee and talks. Berners-Lee was thrilled to be in this great group of people from England, France, Germany, and Switzerland. Sharing ideas and meeting different people was exciting. It made him think: could the good, unexpected talks at the coffee bar be put into a computer program? Inspired, he wrote “Enquire.” This program let people create linked notes about people, files, machines, and ideas. This was like a living map of knowledge that could grow in any direction and in many languages. It showed a natural way to organize information, like how the human mind works.
Soon, building a working, useful network at CERN became his main project. And the main idea was that it should work for everyone and everything. If a system wanted to bring together a place like CERN, it had to work with all kinds of files, computers, languages, and ways of thinking. The idea became clear: hide the main computer parts behind the scenes and create a simple program on top that uses hypertext.
Hypertext had first been shown by Ted Nelson. He surprised many people at a computer meeting in San Francisco in 1968 when he showed how hypertext and hyperlinks could work. An idea or piece of writing in one document could link to ideas in the same document or in other documents. It was a simple idea of jumping from one place to another. This was much like how the human brain thinks, not in a straight line. And Berners-Lee believed it was perfect for his network: a link should be able to connect to anything on any computer.
Blink 3 – The web is born as the 90s begin
Berners-Lee was lucky to have bosses at CERN who supported him and let him work on his ideas. He wanted to create a dream network, which was much bigger than just the computers connected at CERN. One of those bosses was Mike Sendall. He gave Berners-Lee a tool that made the work much faster: the NeXTcube. Steve Jobs developed the NeXTcube during his time when he was not working at Apple. It came with a great tool called Interface Builder. It let him create an application quickly and easily, by dragging and dropping parts.
In 1990, as he was finishing the project, he named it the World Wide Web. Everything was falling into place. HTTP quickly got information. HTML added simple codes to organize this information. The best part was the URL. It was short, flexible, and could point to a sentence in a file or a computer server far away. The hash symbol (#) in the URL connected the network part and the hypertext part. It was where these two ideas joined. The first app, WorldWideWeb.app, could read and write web pages. It was a neat tool that fit the ideas of CERN, where it was created.
It’s important to know that URL was not what Berners-Lee first thought of calling it. Today, URL stands for Uniform Resource Locators. But back in 1990, the rules for HTTP called these links “Universal Document Identifiers” (UDIs). This might seem unimportant, but for Berners-Lee, “universal” was very important. It meant many things. He wanted links to grow in many different ways. The web’s design should come from how people used it. It should not be the same for everyone.
In 1991, Berners-Lee and his CERN colleague Robert Cailliau helped create the web. They carried a NeXT computer and a modem to the Hypertext convention in San Antonio. After convincing the hotel to set up a phone line in the conference room, their demonstration showed a connection from Texas to a computer server in Switzerland. This amazed everyone in the room.
The number of visitors to Berners-Lee’s web server in Geneva grew. Slowly at first. But by the end of 1991, it was getting a hundred visits a day. By 1993, it was 10,000 per day.
Blink 4 – Setting the standards to keep it free
For the web to become popular, its “universal” nature had to develop naturally. Berners-Lee still guided the development of HTTP, HTML, and URLs. But simple text-only programs on special NeXT computers would not be enough. He wanted an open system where anyone could join. Programmers quickly created new things, but at the same time, rules were important.
By 1992, it was already clear that the US was seeing the internet as very important. Senator Al Gore had already written a law that Congress passed. This law approved $600 million to build what was called the “Information Superhighway.” So, the author thought it was a good idea to also work in the US, and he chose to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He also noticed that some of the first people to use the web in the US were already trying to make money from it. But this could cause problems. Some students at the University of Minnesota created another web system called Gopher. But when the University thought about charging money to use it, users protested, and Gopher stopped being used.
That’s when Berners-Lee knew what he wanted to do: he and Robert Cailliau decided that the web should be for everyone. So, on April 30, 1993, CERN made the web’s software and rules free for everyone to use. If everyone was going to help build the web, everyone needed access to its basic tools.
Already, programmers were out there, making it better. Web browsers were very important to make more people use it. One of the first strong competitor in the race to create the best web browser came from UC Berkeley student Pei-Yuan Wei. His ViolaWWW arrived in 1992. It had many cool features that we still use today, like bookmarks, history, back-and-forward buttons, even small programs, and early ways to change how pages looked.
Then came Mosaic, which was created at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. It had a great “What’s New” page that showed users new websites every day. By late 1993, Mosaic was the most popular, and its creators became too confident. The team behind Mosaic wanted to take control and decide how the web should work. They wanted people to call “the web” simply “Mosaic.”
To make fair rules that everyone could follow, giving everyone an equal chance, Berners-Lee and Cailliau organized the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web (known as WWW1) at CERN in May 1994. Then, at MIT, he started the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C, as it’s commonly known, is a system where both small, struggling non-profit groups and very large companies have an equal say.
Blink 5 – The web goes mainstream
The early web felt exciting and created by individuals. When America Online appeared and brought many new users, this was called the “Eternal September.” The web quickly became less about school and more about fun. Early enthusiasts like Justin Hall created their own unique and creative websites. Geocities gave people free online spaces. Craigslist grew in many cities, offering simple pages and useful services.
By the mid-1990s, Håkon Lie’s CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, arrived. This gave designers a way to create pages that changed websites from looking basic and boring to well-designed and exciting. It also helped the move from computers to mobile phones to happen smoothly.
With CSS in place, by 2000, the competition between browsers became very tough. That’s when the internet started to become worse. For a while, it was Netscape versus Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. And behind the scenes of these browsers, something sneaky appeared: cookies. A cookie is a small piece of data a website stores on your computer. This helps the website remember you, so you don’t have to type your password every time. The problem is, some cookies – often called third-party cookies – could also be used by websites to follow what you do online, save your computer’s address, and take away your privacy. They did this to collect information for ads.
Third-party cookies let political groups send ads directly to certain people and groups. Many people say this can make people disagree more and change big events like Brexit and presidential elections.
But there were good things in the early 2000s as well. The most important was Wikipedia. Ward Cunningham’s simple wiki software joined with the author’s idea of global teamwork. It was an encyclopedia that anyone could edit. This made the web’s promise real: people working together creatively on a global level.
Blink 6 – From wonder to worry
When smartphones arrived, they brought many new users to the web. The number of users worldwide quickly jumped from one billion to two billion. Berners-Lee wanted even more people, especially those without internet, to join.
In 2009, with his wife Rosemary Leith, he started the Web Foundation. Its goal was to make internet access a basic human right. They did careful work on rules and plans to make sure people could actually get online. This included visiting schools in Rwanda to set up satellite dishes. He also saw how more internet use helped Burkina Faso, where shared farming ideas saved half a million hectares of land. This was the idea he always had in mind: connecting people makes them more creative. Bringing together two people from different parts of the world, where each person has part of the answer to a very important problem.
The Web Foundation then wrote a three-part Contract for the Web. The first part is for governments: keep everyone connected; keep the internet working; and respect people’s privacy and their rights over their data. The second part is for companies: make the internet cheap and easy to use; respect privacy and build trust; and create technology that brings out the best in people and helps stop the worst. The last part is for citizens: create things and work with others; create online groups that are kind to each other; and protect the web.
All of this was a challenge as the web grew with mobile phones and social media. It was amazing to see how social platforms helped during the Arab Spring protests that helped people overthrow dictatorships. But he also saw how social media helped dictatorships put in new leaders and weaken democracy.
The feeling about the web changed from excitement to concern. Smartphones were easy to use, but they also brought a lot of tracking of users. Bad companies like Cambridge Analytica could find out more than just what brands you liked. They could also know if you were pregnant, what sicknesses you had, and your political views.
Berners-Lee kept looking for a kinder way to design the web. To make this happen, he started building Solid. This is a web platform where no one company controls your data. It will use “personal data pods” stored on regular web servers. It has open rules so different apps can share things like bank details, photos, health information, and messages. But the person who owns the data controls it fully and can move it easily. Mastercard supported the first test versions, and it has kept making good progress, even when AI started to become important.
Blink 7 – Restoring trust in the web
At a 25th-birthday party for the web, Tim Berners-Lee heard Demis Hassabis talk about “neural nets,” which were key to DeepMind’s AI. Instead of being told exactly what to do, this AI could learn by itself. It was a huge step forward. Hassabis later won a Nobel prize for his work with AlphaFold, which uses AI to guess protein shapes more accurately than humans.
But while AI has created some very useful tools, it has also brought up many questions and worries. From problems with who owns creative work, to the ability to make fake videos that look very real, a lot of these concerns are only making people trust less and creating more disagreements.
Some of these issues have quite simple answers. For example, giving digital media special “birth certificates” that people can check to see if they are real, not fake. But a lot of it is still about common ideas like rules, trust, and making sure any smart AI uses data that the user controls. Like everything else, AI should be a tool for us. It should not be used to use us, follow us more, and show us ads.
It would be ideal to trust an AI assistant with your personal information. Not only that, but for the AI to do its best work, it would need access to a lot of your data. Currently, most of your data is kept separate in different apps. These apps don’t share information. And we don’t trust AI with private things like bank details.
This brings us back to Berners-Lee’s Solid platform, which is decentralized and also uses AI. Solid gives people ways to say what they want, lets different companies offer services, and sends data through personal storage they control. If you say yes, an AI tool called “Charlie” could look at all the data in your private data pod to do a job. For example, if you asked it to choose new running shoes, it could check your workout history and money details to find the best fit for you, just like a good helper. But your data would always be safe and kept private.
There are signs that things are moving in this direction. Other decentralized platforms like Mastodon, Matrix, and Bluesky have become more popular. Users are tired of the sneaky computer programs that make people angry on platforms like Facebook and X.
He hopes this trend will be like the original web. First came a few thousand tech fans, then tens of thousands of curious users, then organizations, governments, and then everyone. If the web has taught us anything, it’s that small, uncontrolled ideas, if cared for, can still grow into something huge and strong.
Final summary
In this summary of This Is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee, you’ve learned that the author was a child who loved to learn, raised by creative parents. At CERN, he put together hypertext and networking to create URLs, HTTP, and HTML using a NeXT computer. He then made the code free for everyone to use and build upon. From there, the web became widely popular, with many web browsers that changed old-fashioned message boards into nice-looking personal online places.
Along the way, the author continued to support ideas like net neutrality (all internet traffic treated equally), open data (data available to everyone), and privacy rights. But as more people used the web, more worries appeared. Third-party cookies followed people across different websites, showed their personal information, and made us trust the web less.
These worries have grown with AI. But there is still hope to create a more useful web, where users can say what they want and manage their own information. With Solid, the author hopes to do just that. He wants to create a platform where no one company controls your data. It uses “data pods” that let individuals choose who can see their information, like health records or bank details, in a private way. This way, the web could still become something giving, trustworthy, and truly helpful for people.
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