This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

Since its invention in 1989, the World Wide Web has transformed humanity into the first digital species. Through it, we live, work, argue, and connect, unlocking unprecedented creativity and collaboration while also threatening truth, privacy, and public trust. As artificial intelligence accelerates these changes, understanding the web’s origins—and shaping its future—has never mattered more.

In This Is for Everyone, the web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, tells the story of his revolutionary creation and reflects on today’s most urgent technological challenges. With humor and candor, he recalls arriving at CERN as a young engineer, when the internet was still largely academic, and envisioning a universal system to connect people, information, and ideas. The invention of the World Wide Web brought that vision to life.

Born the same year as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Berners-Lee chose a different path, releasing the web freely, without commercial reward. As it spread worldwide, he helped guide its governance and developed foundational protocols such as HTML and HTTP, driven by a commitment to creativity and collaboration for all.

Blending rich anecdotes with clear-eyed analysis, This Is for Everyone offers an inside account of the web’s invention and a roadmap for its future. As AI reshapes the digital world, Berners-Lee argues for a new approach that gives users control over their data and reimagines the web as a force for human flourishing rather than profit or power.