This is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee

Macmillan, September 2025

Why?

Tim Berners-Lee is almost unique in the history of technology in that his story is not, at heart, a business story. That alone makes him interesting.

Most transformative technologies are remembered through the prism of their commercialisation rather than their invention. The internet, however, sits oddly apart: an infrastructure that now underpins vast global markets, but which began life as a modest attempt to help scientists share information more easily.

Given that the World Wide Web now dominates so much of modern life - economically, culturally and politically - it felt inevitable to be curious about how it came into being, and what its inventor thinks should happen next.

Enjoyment factor

This is not a dramatic founder narrative in the Silicon Valley mould, and it never tries to be. There are no boardroom battles, no blitz-scaling, no tales of ruthless competitors being crushed along the way. As a result, the book can feel a little flat at times. You can sense the effort in places, presumably from the ghostwriter, to inject colour and narrative tension where the material itself resists it.

That said, it remains a useful and often illuminating read. For anyone building a business in the digital economy, or simply trying to understand how one of the most important pieces of modern infrastructure came into existence, it provides valuable context. It is a reminder that many of the systems we now treat as inevitable were once contingent, fragile ideas shaped by very specific choices and values.

It left me thinking ...

History is full of examples where the inventor and the commercial winner are not the same person. James Watt refined the steam engine, but others industrialised it at scale. In textiles, the mechanisation of weaving involved countless inventors, while figures like Richard Arkwright became synonymous with its commercial success. Innovation and exploitation are often separated by temperament as much as by opportunity.

Berners-Lee clearly belongs in the first category. He is, above all else, a coder with a strong - some might say utopian - belief in a web that is open, decentralised and benign. In his ideal world, users behave well, data is respected, and the system is not captured by commercial or political interests. The problem, of course, is that this is not the world we live in.

Much of his frustration is directed at social media, which he portrays as a largely malign force. While there is no doubt that algorithmic addiction and incentive structures have created real problems, the analysis here feels thin. Social platforms are treated as uniformly corrosive, with little acknowledgement of the creator economy that has flourished within them, or of the businesses, careers and genuinely high-quality content that many of these systems have enabled.

Podcasts escape much of this criticism (he misses the fact that they are increasingly merged with video) but platforms like YouTube, which is rapidly replacing traditional living-room television across age groups, are firmly placed in the “pure evil” category. This binary framing feels out of step with how media actually functions today, where the majority of the time, quality, trust and value are shaped as much by creators and audiences as by platforms themselves.

Despite these frustrations, This Is for Everyone is invaluable in helping to understand both the origins of the web and the direction Berners-Lee believes it should take. His current focus is on user-owned data, and on rebalancing power away from centralised platforms.

In that context, it is striking how quickly he dismisses blockchain - largely, it seems, because of its association with speculative crypto culture. That feels like a missed opportunity, given its potential role in enabling user ownership of data, identity and audiences within what many describe as Web 3.0.

Instead, Berners-Lee is building Solid, a data “wallet” intended to give users control over their personal information. It is notable that this is his first actual business, something he a makes a point of. Yet it remains unclear how much traction the project is gaining, or how it ultimately delivers a sustainable return - despite having secured venture backing, he still describes it in the manner of a utilitarian coding exercise.

Overall, this is an interesting and important book, but not quite as enlightening as I had hoped. It excels as a historical account of how the web came to be, but feels less convincing when diagnosing the present or mapping a realistic path forward. But perhaps that, too, is fitting: inventors rarely get the final word on what their inventions become.