The Web free for 33 years: the day CERN gave it all away

You opened a browser today without thinking about what you were doing. Clicked a link, went to another, went back, opened a tab, closed another. That happened billions of times today across the world — on phones, computers, televisions, fridges. The web has become the air the internet breathes. But on 30 April 1993, it could have taken a completely different path. In a building in Geneva, two directors signed a half-page document that decided nobody would own it. That it would belong to everyone.

The proposal his boss called "vague, but exciting"

The story starts in March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist working at CERN, wrote an internal document called "Information Management: A Proposal". The problem he wanted to solve was simple and frustrating: CERN had hundreds of researchers scattered around the world, each with their own computer, their own operating system, their own way of organising information. When somebody left a project, the knowledge went with them. Berners-Lee wanted to create a system where information was linked together, accessible from any machine.

Berners-Lee's supervisor, Mike Sendall, read the document and scrawled across the cover: "vague, but exciting". It wasn't exactly a blank cheque, but it wasn't a rejection either. Berners-Lee got the time and the room to carry on. The project's original name was "Mesh". Only in 1990, when he started writing the code in earnest, did the name change to World Wide Web.

To develop the system, Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer — that expensive, elegant machine Steve Jobs had created after being pushed out of Apple in 1985. NeXTSTEP was an advanced operating system for its day, and it was on it that Berners-Lee wrote the first web server (CERN httpd), the first browser (called, simply, WorldWideWeb) and the specifications for HTTP and HTML. It all came out of that black cube.

The world's first website and the partner history half forgot

On 20 December 1990, Berners-Lee published the first website in the history of the web. The URL was info.cern.ch and the content was basically an explanation of the project itself. No images, no colour, no layout — it was text with links. But it was text that pointed to other text, and that text pointed to more text still. It was the whole concept, working.

Working alongside Berners-Lee in that period was Robert Cailliau, a Belgian engineer who was also researching hypertext at CERN and became a crucial partner in convincing the institution's management that the thing was worth investing in. Cailliau rarely turns up in the headlines — history has an irritating tendency to simplify the origins of technology down to a single hero — but he was an essential part of the whole process.

Between 1991 and 1993, the web grew slowly but steadily inside academia. Other labs and universities started running web servers. The number of sites in the world could be counted on the fingers of one hand, then two hands, then in the dozens. The technology worked. The question was what CERN would do with it.

30 April 1993: the half-page document

That day, two CERN executives signed a short document — almost informal for the weight of what it represented. Walter Hoogland, Director of Research, and Helmut Weber, Director of Administration, signed a declaration addressed to "whom it may concern". The text established that CERN was relinquishing all intellectual property rights over the World Wide Web code, both source and binaries, and granting permission for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute the software freely.

There was no licensing fee. No royalty for commercial use. No restriction by country or type of organisation. With half a page and two signatures, CERN decided the web would belong to nobody — which in practice means it would belong to everybody.

It's hard to overstate the weight of that decision. In 1993 the alternative model was already well established: proprietary technologies, commercial licences, usage agreements. Had CERN gone down the standard corporate route of the era, the web could have become a closed system like so many others that tried to dominate digital communication before it and failed. AOL had its walled garden. CompuServe had its own. France's Minitel was a wholly proprietary system that lasted decades in France — but never really left France.

What happened next

In April 1993 there were around 50 web servers in the world. By the end of that same year the number had jumped past 500. The Mosaic browser was released in January 1993 by NCSA — before CERN's decision, but taking advantage of the open technology — and for the first time brought inline images to the web, turning that text environment into something visually closer to what we know today. With the public domain guaranteed and Mosaic growing, the web's expansion became exponential.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, to maintain the web's open standards and ensure the original philosophy — interoperability, free access, no centralised control — remained the organising principle. The W3C still exists today, and it's the reason a site works in Chrome and in Firefox and in Safari and in any other decent browser.

The decision of 30 April 1993 wasn't just generous — it was strategically brilliant. A proprietary web would have created fragmentation, would have handed some company the power to decide who got in and who was left out, which content was allowed, what the fee for access would be. Openness is what allowed the web to scale to five billion users. Ironically, by giving everything up, CERN guaranteed the web would become the most important infrastructure of the modern world.

Thirty-three years on

In 2026, we live in a moment where the web's original openness is under constant pressure from every direction. Closed platforms that only work inside their own ecosystems. APIs that shut overnight. Algorithms that decide what you see with no transparency about the rules. There's a permanent tension between the web as a public good and the web as a commercial product.

But the fact that this tension exists — that it still makes sense to fight for openness, that open standards still matter — is the direct legacy of that half-page document signed in Geneva 33 years ago. Two signatures on a piece of paper created the battlefield we're still playing on.

If you got this far via a browser, you're using the direct consequence of that decision. Worth remembering now and then. And if you want to understand how the web visually became what it is today, the post on Mosaic 1.0 tells the other half of the story — the browser that put images on the web and convinced the world it wasn't just a scientists' thing. For the story of how computing gradually became invisible around us, there's also the piece on Mark Weiser and ubiquitous computing — the man who predicted all of this would one day become air.