How the World Got Wired · The Web, Given Away

The Gift

For the next two years, the web grew slowly. By the end of 1991, there were a few dozen web servers around the world, mostly at universities and research labs. By the end of 1992, there were a few hundred. It was interesting, but it was a small thing, used by a small group of scientists.

It was also not alone. There were competing systems for organizing information on the internet. The most popular was called Gopher, which had been built at the University of Minnesota. Gopher was actually more widely used than the web in 1992. It looked simpler. It worked well.

Then, in February of 1993, the University of Minnesota made an announcement. They were considering charging fees to companies that used Gopher. Not very much money — but some.

Almost overnight, the people who had been building tools and services on top of Gopher panicked. Even a small fee meant Gopher could no longer be the foundation for anything bigger. Big companies, in particular, would not bet their futures on a technology that could be taxed by a single university.

A few months later, on April 30, 1993, CERN made its own announcement.

The World Wide Web would be free. Forever. CERN, an international laboratory funded by the governments of many European countries, would place all of the web’s technology in the public domain. Anyone in the world could use it. Anyone could build on it. Anyone could improve it. No one would ever owe CERN a penny for it.

Berners-Lee had pushed hard for this. He could have insisted on patents. He could have tried to start a company. He had built the most important new piece of software in a generation, and he could have made himself one of the richest men in the world. He chose not to.

The announcement was one page long. It changed everything.

Within months, almost everyone working on Gopher quietly switched to the web. Within a year, the number of web servers had grown from a few hundred to a few thousand. Within two years, to tens of thousands. Today there are hundreds of millions.

This was the second great gift of the internet age. Cerf and Kahn had given away TCP/IP, the rules for moving packets around the world. Berners-Lee had given away the web, the rules for sharing documents on top of those packets. Together, those two gifts — both paid for by governments, both released freely to everyone — are the foundation of almost everything you do online today.

It is worth pausing on this for a moment. Most of the most valuable things in the modern world are sold. You pay for a house. You pay for a car. You pay for clothes, for food, for music, for movies. The biggest companies in the world made their owners rich by selling things.

The thing that made all of those companies possible — the underlying technology of the internet and the web — was given away. Not because it had no value. It had immense value. It was given away because the people who made it believed it should belong to everyone.

This is rare. It is precious. And, as you will see in the next several chapters, it created an enormous opportunity for other people to come along and build companies, on top of those free foundations, that made their owners some of the richest people who have ever lived.

That is one of the central puzzles of this whole book. Why did the people who built the foundations give them away, while the people who built businesses on top of those foundations did not? There is no single answer. Part of it is that the foundation-builders were paid by governments and saw their work as a public service. Part of it is that the business-builders saw an opportunity and took it. Part of it is that, by the time the business-builders showed up, the most important decisions had already been made by people who weren’t trying to be rich.

For now, just remember: in 1993, the web became free. The doors were thrown open. The age of the public-funded internet was ending. The age of private money and giant companies was about to begin.

But first, before we go there, I want to take you out of the laboratories and into the physical world for a couple of chapters. The internet, by 1993, was no longer just an idea. It was something — pipes, cables, ships, switches, real buildings full of humming machines. Somebody had to lay all of those cables. Somebody had to build all of that equipment. And the somebodies who did, by and large, are not the people you have met so far.

In Chapter 7, we are going down to the bottom of the ocean.

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