Invention of the World Wide Web

Unleashing Real Freedom of Speech

Tim Berners-Lee

At 01:37 GMT in the afternoon of August 6th 1991, Oxford physics graduate, Tim Berners-Lee, posted the first ever Web page on what was to become the World Wide Web. In it he instructed readers how to set up their own Web pages which would be accessible to anyone connected to the, then relatively unknown, Internet. The Internet is a community of computer users who linked their computers together to share information. He also offered hypertext links to other sites simply by clicking on the Web page address.

Berner-Lee never made any money from his invention. Today he is lives, in relative anonymity, in America where he is a campaigner for freedom of information.

Meanwhile, the World Wide Web is used by billions of people, every moment of every day, in every corner of the world. The World Wide Web has changed the world even more than the telephone. Nearly all the knowledge in the world is constantly available online. 

Baroness Susan Greefield, a neuroscientist, expounds the vast knowledge available on the Web and considers that we are now all "answer rich", She tempers this with the question: "If we are all answer rich, are we now question poor".

The very empowerment that the Web brings is also it’s downside. With freedom of information comes pornography, political extremism, violence, piracy, defamation, disinformation, and more. You can say, or contradict, anything you like on the Web. The wealth of information is often overwhelming, but once the genie is out of the bottle, there’s no turning back.