Tim Berners-Lee: “This is for everyone”

I recently read “This is for everyone” by Tim Berners-Lee. This book is a very good reminder about how we got to ’the internet’. Why did Tim Berners-Lee develop the World Wide Web. And which decision did lead to this beatiful thing that we take for granted today? I especially enjoyed it to read about this topic in the light of all the recent AI developments. Will the web as we know it die? Is it still worth having a blog? What would fundamental models be trained on if there wasn’t a human created internet anymore? Great questions in an interesting time.

I need this picture for a little multi-meta layer post, I am working on.

On 2025-12-11, I posted about this also on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@davidbeck/115701322476494055

On 2025-12-12, I followed up with a post on LinkedIn. The post read as follows:

*If you think about “open internet” and are looking for a good read over the holidays, then “This is for everyone” by Tim Berners-Lee might be for you. *I’m bringing this up as discussions about “open internet” are emerging in various contexts. The conversations are complex. Therefore, it is probably a good idea to check where “the internet” came from, how it developed, and what differentiates open and closed approaches. Spoiler alert: If you are asked for a login to see content, it is probably not ‘open’ – at least not in the classical sense. While there are some lengthy sections about British elite clubs to which the author was invited, the book provides a good overview of the beginnings of the world wide web, the risks it faced, how it developed, and what the future might look like. Now, I am fully aware that there is an irony to reading this book on a Kindle device and posting this on LinkedIn.

The post was curated with the following image:

For the image, the following alt-text was provided:

An ebook reader on top of a laptop with stickers. Both on a wooden table. The book cover displayed on the ebook reader is showing the cover of “this is for everyone” by Tim Berners-Lee, the Inventor of the World Wide Web.On the laptop, there are stickers from Codeberg, Mastodon, Wikipedia, the CCC Chaos Knot, as well as the band Tocotronic.