There at the Birth of the Web: Internet Inventors on What They’d Do Differently Next Time

VANCOUVER, British Columbia—Here’s a popular question successful people get asked: If you had known what you know now when you were just starting out, what would you have done differently?

Al Gore at Yahoo’s Web at 25 event.

At a Yahoo event here to celebrate the web’s 25th birthday, I asked some of the people who were present for the formative moments of the web a similar question: If you knew 25 years ago how the web would turn out, would you do anything differently? Here are some of their responses.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web:
Berners-Lee rolled his eyes at the question. “Everybody asks me that!” he said. “I wouldn’t have put the ‘//’ in web addresses, OK?”

That, of course, is his pat answer. He did have more to say. He mentioned that he would have gotten engineers working harder on email protocols, especially on sender identification. “We could have avoided spam.”

Berners-Lee today is pushing the idea of a Bill or Rights for the web, so that the web itself reflects human rights, especially around privacy and freedom of expression.

Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, and a very early proponent of government support of the open Internet:
“I would do it all over again, with more gusto,” he said. But Gore is concerned about the trend the web is taking away from supporting individual rights. He said the “double-helix of the NSA and the stalker culture” is a growing danger to democracy on the web. By “stalker culture,” he means the commercial collection of far more data than is necessary to conduct good business.

Left to right: Will.i.am, Tim Berners-Lee, Kathy Savitt (Yahoo), Al Gore, Jimmy Wales, and Larry Lessig

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia:
Wales is mostly pleased with the way the web turned out, because it could have gone another direction.

When the web was just starting out, proprietary online services like America Online and CompuServe were battling for the attention and accounts of the newly online. Had one or both of those centralized, and for-profit services become the world’s information gateways, then entrepreneurs would not have had the freedom to build the services or audiences they have over the past 25 years. “We didn’t have to ask permission to build Wikipedia,” he said.

“But it was close,” he added. “We dodged a bullet.”

As Wales said that, Gore mentioned that launching the website whitehouse.gov in 1994 was a calculated move, designed to showcase the open web over the proprietary dial-up services of the day. 

Bill Gross, early search engine advertising pioneer:
“I should have invented the browser,” he said. It was only when Netscape was preparing to go public, he recalled, that he recognized the power of the new model. “The Netscape browser had 30 million users. It was a way to talk to customers directly.”

Roger McNamee, longtime investor in startups (like Facebook):
McNamee answered the question by looking forward. “The Web at 25 is more interesting than when it started. The opportunity is better. The future is better than the past.”

He added, though, “Unless Apple and Google usurp the web with apps.”

Selfies or it didn’t happen.

The standard answer
Rob Hayes, a venture capitalist who worked on Palm and other early mobile platforms, saw the past 25 years as a collection of missed economic opportunities, as did many people I talked with. “I would have bought every domain name I could get my hands on,” he said. Other people had similar reactions, most along the lines of, “I would have put everything I had into Apple stock.”

Luminary wrap-up
After I got these statements, several of the luminaries (Berners-Lee, Gore, Wales, Internet lawyer and activist Larry Lessig, and later Will.i.am, who recorded the YouTube smash Yes We Can music video in 2008), spoke on a panel. Lessig summed up the panel’s general theme: “It is our job to protect and defend the ideas Tim Berners-Lee has kept solid.”

Gore pointed out that the Internet has the potential to open up democracy again; he said it reached its high point in the era of print and newspapers before TV started to control the flow of knowledge to the public. The Internet can turn that around—but first, he said, we must correct the fact that “the NSA is putting our values at risk.”

Then a birthday cake came out, everybody sang Happy Birthday to the web, and Will.i.am DJ’d a dance set. 

Tim Berners-Lee and All Gore cap off 25 years of the web.

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