GENEVA — As the world wide web turns 30, its creator Tim Berners-Lee mused over the problems that have arisen due as a result of his invention.

Hate speech, privacy issues, propaganda, hacking. Where did it all go so wrong?

On Tuesday, March 12, 2019, Berners-Lee found himself celebrating the web’s 30th birthday at its place of origin – CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research at a Web@30 conference.

A particle physicist working at CERN like so many other scientists from around he world, Englishman Berners-Lee, now 63, wrote out a proposal on March 12, 1989 – an idea to connect the computers in a network so that the hard-working scientists could continue to collaborate even after they parted ways.

Berners-Lee submitted the proposal for an “information management system” to his boss, Mike Sendall, who scribbled at the top of it, “Vague, but exciting.”

You can peruse the original musings that led to what you’re communicating with at this very moment right here. He began it with:

This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experimentsat CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems andderives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.

https://cds.cern.ch/record/369245/files/dd-89-001.pdf

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal.

Earlier today in Geneva, Berners-Lee and other old-timers from that burgeoning tech era, urged governments, corporations, companies and citizens worldwide to come together and make the web more accessible to those who are not yet “online.”

Half the world still isn’t.

“The web,” Berners-Lee stated, “is not the web we wanted in every respect.”

Berners-Lee doesn’t like everything he sees – all the trolls and harassment, spread of misinformation – referring to these variables as ills of its “digital adolescence.”

Berners-Lee wants his internet to Grow Up.

Issuing a letter and speaking to reporters Monday about his historical first paper he penned with an outline of what would become the world wide web, Berners-Lee couldn’t have foreseen that moment would transform billions of lives and reconstruct the global economy.

For the original PDF from CERN, click here.