The Garden and the Gate
Tim Berners-Lee, open protocols, and the fight to keep the web free
This is the third in a series exploring the hidden history of crypto: where it came from, who shaped it, and the systems of power it sought to subvert.
In March 1989, inside a quiet office at CERN, a 33-year-old systems engineer submitted a strange proposal to his boss.
It was called Information Management: A Proposal. His name: Tim Berners-Lee. The document was vague, eccentric, and frustratingly incomplete.
His supervisor scribbled on the cover: "Vague, but exciting."
It would become the blueprint for the World Wide Web.
Mark 1
Tim Berners-Lee was born into computing. His parents had worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first commercial general-purpose electronic computer. He grew up surrounded by early code and algorithms, but his obsession was with making things connect.
By the late 1980s, CERN had become a hub of international research. Its networks were a mess, however. Different departments used different protocols. No shared standard. No easy way to retrieve or link information.
Berners-Lee wanted to solve this, not by centralising everything, but by building a system of connections: hypertext, URIs, and a protocol he called HTTP. His proposal imagined a web of information that anyone could access, publish to, and build upon.
But it was more than just technical plumbing. It was an ideology. A belief that knowledge should be universally accessible, decentralised, and free.
His work followed the breakthrough of Diffie and Hellman in 1976, who had challenged the state’s monopoly on cryptography. Then in 1981, David Chaum had proposed mix networks to safeguard digital privacy. Chaum’s vision culminated in DigiCash, the first working digital cash system. Yet even he relied on banks that ultimately rejected anonymity.
Berners-Lee was walking a similar line: build something open, decentralised, and robust enough to resist enclosure.
Walled Gardens
In 1989, digital communication was fragmenting. Commercial online services like CompuServe and AOL were expanding rapidly, but they were closed ecosystems. Content stayed inside the garden. Users paid for access to curated platforms, not for the freedom to publish or connect openly.
Meanwhile, governments and telecoms were only beginning to sense the potential of networked communication. Their instinct was not openness: it was control.
The internet had already existed but it was primitive. Used predominantly for military and academic purposes, its user interface was hostile to anyone who had not been privy to specialised training. Early internet users existed within walled gardens; shared environments with strict access and limited interoperability.
Open protocols like TCP/IP had won out over proprietary networks like OSI (Open Systems Interconnection). But it wasn’t yet clear what would run on top of them. The question wasn’t just how networks should talk but what they should say.
Into this moment of uncertainty, Berners-Lee released something radical: a protocol (HTTP) that anyone could implement, and a markup language (HTML) that anyone could write. Between his 1989 proposal and its release in 1991, he coded the first web browser and server himself. The first website explained how the Web worked—and how to join it.
He did not patent it. He did not commercialise it. He gave it away.
The quiet architect
Berners-Lee was not a showman. He didn’t seek power. He didn’t call himself a founder. But he was quietly radical.
In 1993, the first graphical browser, Mosaic, was released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA. It brought the Web to the masses. That same year, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to ensure open standards. But the pressure to monetise was already in motion.
Venture capital firms and major tech companies began carving up cyberspace. Platforms like Netscape, Yahoo, and later Google emerged. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows. Infrastructure centralised. Users followed.
But Berners-Lee insisted: the web must remain free. He said:
‘You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.’
That stance put him increasingly at odds with the direction the web was taking. The vision of a shared commons was giving way to the logic of platforms.
The centralisation of the web
The protocols remained open. But the experience began to close.
Browsers became corporate battlegrounds. Operating systems locked in users. Portals replaced hyperlinks with feeds. Infrastructure was monopolised by a few providers: Amazon, Google, Microsoft.
Advertising became the dominant economic model. Identity was no longer self-declared, but platform-assigned.
What had started as a decentralised network of documents was morphing into a series of silos: walled platforms where content, identity, and behaviour could be monetised and monitored.
Case in point: the rise of Facebook in the mid-2000s. What began as a digital yearbook became a gated platform for the world’s attention. APIs were restricted. Data was hoarded. Algorithms replaced hyperlinks.
By the early 2000s, the web was still open in theory—but users were fenced in. The logic of the garden had returned.
Freedom, Infrastructure, and the Logic of Control
Berners-Lee’s invention echoed Chaum’s digital cash and Diffie-Hellman’s cryptography. All three shared a deep commitment to decentralisation, not just in design, but in politics.
But each faced the same challenge: the systems they built were absorbed by the very forces they sought to resist. Financial institutions sidelined Chaum. The state regulated encryption. The web was platformised.
Here is the grim lens: that entrenched power adapts not by fighting directly, but by absorbing resistance. External energies are captured, rebranded, and redeployed. The revolution becomes a feature.
The Illusion of Control: Data, Platforms, and the Price of Free
Today, the web appears borderless. But it is shaped by invisible borders: algorithmic timelines, behavioural profiling, login walls.
We navigate platforms that remember us better than we remember ourselves. We trade privacy for access, autonomy for ease. We are told we are in control.
Berners-Lee’s life between 1993 and 2019 was defined by advocacy. As director of the W3C, he pushed for web standards, open data, and digital rights. But the tide was strong.
In 2004, he was knighted. In 2016, he launched Inrupt. In 2019, he unveiled Solid, a project to give users control of their own data through personal online data stores (PODs). The adoption was limited. But the principle remained.
The fork in the road
In 2019, Berners-Lee launched a new project: Solid. It aimed to give users control of their own data. It hasn’t yet taken off.
But his vision remains the same.
In an interview that year, he said:
‘People have become disillusioned with the web, but we have to remember: it doesn’t have to be this way.’
The gate can still open.
Bibliography
Berners-Lee, T. (1989). Information Management: A Proposal
Berners-Lee, T. (1999). Weaving the Web
Gillies, J. & Cailliau, R. (2000). How the Web Was Born
Green, M. (2015). A (Partial) History of Digital Cash
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Interviews with Tim Berners-Lee (1998–2023)
Internet Archive (Various screenshots and documents)
Hafner, K. & Lyon, M. (1996). Where Wizards Stay Up Late
Zittrain, J. (2008). The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
Interviews and statements from Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina, and Vint Cerf