Tim Berners-Lee, CERN, and the Memo That Opened the Web

If the Internet has taught me anything it's that history is a bitch. And awfully reductive, at that.

History is inherently unstable. It is at constant odds with its noisy, sprawling self. The story is never not looking back over its shoulder. The past is never not being evoked and written down, and then written down again, even as it continues careening helplessly into a sobering unknown. And it's that retrospection, the recalling of the story so far, that often tilts history toward a handful of flashpoints – the first computer, say, or the birth of the World Wide Web.

This isn't the historian's fault so much as it is non-historians looking for vague excuses to get blasted on culturally relevant anniversaries, birthdays and milestones. But, still. History likes a good marker. And this can blot out the slow grind of progress that every so often lights the fuse.

Take the history of the World Wide Web. The Web's back-story is insanely drawn out and knotty (and not at all free of government and military influence). The Web has many birthdays and just as many, if not more, pioneering architects. I won’t even begin to try pointing out every breakthrough in the unlikely leap from an idea cooked up in the early 1980s by Tim Berners-Lee, then an independent contractor at CERN in Geneva, to you, sitting right there, pretending to work but really just dicking around on the Internet like you always do / the rest of us.

But at the risk of being reductionist, or of coming off desperate for some vague excuse to call off the rest of the day, I'll hazard the guess that the Web, for all its promise and pitfalls, would be a much different place if it weren’t for a short declaration from CERN’s then directors nearly two decades ago today.

On April 30, 1993, the Web was opened to the public.

OK, so it took a while for a real critical mass of curious laypeople from around the world to sign on and see what all the hype was about. The April 30 declaration flashpoint wasn’t blinding, at least not in a great initial blaze.

To that point, the Web had mainly been the preserve of government and military officials and researchers at gargantuan science projects, such as those at CERN and Fermilab. Through the rest of the ’90s the Web would retain a sort of luxury status.

But it was CERN’s remarkable foresight, here, that could be felt years down the road as having envisioned a free and open global commons in cyberspace. By placing protocol for the World Wide Web squarely in the public sphere and, crucially, by not demanding that everybody lifting the code pony up for the goods, CERN secured for the public at large a dedicated system for tapping the Internet.

As Berners-Lee, the engineer who created the protocol that enables both website generation and linking, would go on to say: “There have always been things which people are good at, and things computers have been good at, and little overlap between the two.”

He may have a point. And in the long, complex history of the never-ending Web story, which is being written with such frenzy (and read at such fever pitches), reduced almost entirely to an epic battle for control, for open-source rights, for the right to be forgotten, the negative to that statement may hold, too. Because if the Internet has taught me anything it’s that pretty much everything, really, is a bitch.

• Motherboard TV: Free the Network
• The Internet in Your Hands
• Could the Internet Be Held for Ransom With Scissors?
• CERN: Beware the “Dark Side” of the Internet

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson