Leon Furze

In 1989, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

Although his boss at the time, Mike Sendall, didn’t immediately pick up what Berners-Lee was putting down (writing “vague but exciting” on the first proposal), the project got off the ground in 1990 at particle physics lab CERN.

Berners-Lee wrote three core technologies that still underpin the internet today: HTML, HTTP, and URI. This isn’t a blog about the internet, so I won’t go into the technicalities, but if you’re interested you should read the world wide web foundation’s history of the project.

The point is, that from those initial efforts and the subsequent work of researchers and developers across the globe, the World Wide Web continued to scale and in 1994 Berners-Lee left CERN to found the World Wide Wed Consortium (W3C) to create the first standards of the open web.

The core principles of the open web are summed up on the WWW Foundation website as follows:

• Decentralisation: No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure … and no “kill switch”! This also implies freedom from indiscriminate censorship and surveillance.
• Non-discrimination: If I pay to connect to the internet with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service, then we can both communicate at the same level. This principle of equity is also known as Net Neutrality.
• Bottom-up design: Instead of code being written and controlled by a small group of experts, it was developed in full view of everyone, encouraging maximum participation and experimentation.
• Universality: For anyone to be able to publish anything on the web, all the computers involved have to speak the same languages to each other, no matter what different hardware people are using; where they live; or what cultural and political beliefs they have. In this way, the web breaks down silos while still allowing diversity to flourish.
• Consensus: For universal standards to work, everyone had to agree to use them. Tim and others achieved this consensus by giving everyone a say in creating the standards, through a transparent, participatory process at W3C.
  https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/

But is this the web that we’re experiencing in 2025?

Is it the internet that young people, born long after the birth of the WWW, are accessing?

I don’t think so.

Principles of the Narrow Web

Instead, we’ve ended up with a “Narrow Web”. It’s a web controlled by a handful of major platforms:

• Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp)
• Google (Search, Gmail, YouTube, Workspace, Cloud)
• Microsoft (365, Azure, LinkedIn)
• Amazon (AWS)
• ByteDance (TikTok)
• X (inc. Grok)

The narrow web is a modern day subversion of the original intent of the www. So what might be the (hidden) principles?

Perhaps the inverse of the W3C:

• Centralisation: The goal of Narrow Web companies is to centralise control and limit the capacity of users to post outside of walled enclaves. Within platforms, censorship and surveillance is the prerogative of the platform owner. These forces compound with network effects as switching costs get higher and users are willing to submit to more and more invasion of privacy in exchange for services.
• Discrimination: Users are compelled to pay for access to better services, including ad-free platforms or “premium” features such as the ability to search other users (LinkedIn) or verify their identity (X). Users on free tiers have more limited options for communicating with premium, paid users.
• Top-down design: Platforms are not interoperable, and communication across and between platforms is limited due to deliberate design choices. Code is proprietary and closed-source, and opaque search and recommendation algorithms determine who and what users can access online.
• Silos: Compounding the pay-to-play platforms and lack of interoperability, siloed corporations work to capture as much of the attention market as possible. The universal internet still exists, but most people only interact with a handful of apps and sites.
• Discord: The developers of the Narrow Web have little interest in consensus, unless it is on their terms. Consensus is achieved through lobbying and threats, such as the threat of withdrawing products from jurisdictions with unfavourable regulations.

Grim reading, perhaps, but I find that the current state of the internet is almost a mirror image of the core principles of the open web.

So my question is this: what are we going to do about it?

Widening the Web

I hate framing a problem without at least suggesting a solution. So here are a few things we can do right now to return to the core principles of the open web.

1. Leave platforms and return to websites
2. Focus on quality of connections over quantity
3. Publish on your own site and take control of content
4. Explore open source and the federated internet
5. Talk to young people about the original intent of the Internet, not just the disappointment of the present.

It might not be enough to wrestle control of the internet away from big tech overnight. But we have seen the power of community as millions of users left X, and we will see millions more continue to leave Facebook and other Meta platforms.

There is another internet out there. It might be buried, but the foundations are solid.

Grab a shovel.

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