The internet is in decline – it needs rewilding | John Naughton

The online world was meant to be an open system but has become dominated by huge corporations. If we are to revive it, that must end

Browsing through a history of online public messaging last week, I came across a magical photograph from 1989 or 1990. It shows the world's first web server. It was Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT workstation in Cern, the international physics research lab, where he worked at the time. On the case is a tattered sticky label, on which is scribbled, in red ink, This machine is a server DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"

Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, had come up with the idea for a world wide web" as a way of locating and accessing documents that were scattered all over the internet. With a small group of colleagues he envisaged, designed and implemented it in the late 1980s and eventually put the whole thing - protocols, server and browser software, HTML specification, etc. - on one of Cern's internet servers, and in doing so changed the world.