Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Tim Berners-Lee

My vision was based on sharing, not exploitation - and here's why it's still worth fighting for

I was 34 years old when I first had the idea for the world wide web. I took every opportunity to talk about it: pitching it in meetings, sketching it out on a whiteboard for anyone who was interested, even drawing the web in the snow with a ski pole for my friend on what was meant to be a peaceful day out.

I relentlessly petitioned bosses at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), where I worked at the time, who initially found the idea a little eccentric" but eventually gave in and let me work on it. I was seized by the idea of combining two pre-existing computer technologies: the internet and hypertext, which takes an ordinary document and brings it to life by adding links".