Web's never-to-be-repeated revolution
The web is having a birthday. This month, we will have the 15th anniversary of the creation of the first web page. It is the birthday of Tim Berners-Lee's amazing idea that there could be a worldwide web, linked not by spider silk but by hypertext links …
Context & Ripple Effects
Written as the web turns 15, this FT reflection captures the moment when Tim Berners-Lee's hypertext idea had already become infrastructure but its long-term costs were barely visible. Looking back from today's coverage, it reads as the baseline against which every later assessment is measured: the 35th-birthday warning about power concentration and data exploitation and the 31st-birthday concerns over harassment and unequal access both measure how far the open, decentralized web of 2005 has drifted from its founding design.
First-order effects
- The anniversary cements Berners-Lee's status as the web's moral reference point, giving his future interventions — on access, data control, and decentralization — outsized authority precisely because he never commercialized the invention.
- In 2005, the 'never-to-be-repeated' framing highlights that the web's openness was an accident of timing: no subsequent network could again launch without incumbents, investors, and gatekeepers already in place.
Second-order effects
- That unrepeatable openness becomes the yardstick for critique: as platforms concentrate power, Berners-Lee's founding design is invoked to argue the web has been captured, culminating decades later in his push for user data control through Solid.
- The gap between the idealized origin story and platform reality creates a market for 'fix-the-web' ventures — though Inrupt's struggle to scale shows how hard it is to retrofit decentralization onto an entrenched web.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the web's history becomes a case study in how open protocols drift toward centralized control, making decentralization a permanent rather than episodic reform agenda — one its inventor keeps championing even as AI reshapes the medium.
- The anniversary also foreshadows the monetization of the web's own mythology: the eventual $5.4M NFT sale of the original source code turned the founding artifact itself into a collectible, symbolizing how thoroughly the revolution became heritage.
The trend: Each web anniversary has shifted from celebrating an open revolution to auditing its erosion, making inventor-led decentralization efforts the recurring response to a platform-dominated web.