A Sunday Times Bestseller The inventor of the World Wide Web explores his vision’s promise―and how it can be redeemed for the future. Since its invention in 1989, the World Wide Web has changed everything―transforming humanity into the first digital species. Through the web, we live, work, dream, quarrel, and connect. It has launched a new era of creativity and collaboration while unleashing powerful forces that imperil truth and privacy and polarize public debate. As artificial intelligence supercharges the online experience, the stakes of understanding the web’s origins and evolution, and guiding its future, have never been greater. In This Is for Everyone , the web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, recounts the story of his iconic creation and offers a vital perspective on today’s most urgent technological questions. With his trademark humor and candor, he recounts how he arrived at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, as a young engineer. At a time when the internet’s use was primarily academic, he foresaw its potential as a tool to connect people, information, and ideas. By inventing the World Wide Web, he realized this vision. Born in the same year as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee would become a different kind of technologist, famously distributing his innovation for no commercial reward. As the web rapidly gained users around the world, he oversaw its global governance and developed HTML, HTTP, and other fundamental protocols. His goal was to unleash a wave of creativity and collaboration for the benefit of all―a goal he has pursued to this day. Peppered with rich anecdotes and amusing reflections, This Is for Everyone is a gripping, in-the-room account of the invention of the web, the foundation of our digital world. As the rapid development of artificial intelligence brings new risks and possibilities, Berners-Lee also offers a crucial guide to the decisions ahead―and proposes a new approach to the web that enables users to control their data and put it to rewarding new uses. In so doing, he shows how our digital lives can be reengineered for the sake of human flourishing rather than for profit or power. “An affable and avuncular narrator . . . Berners-Lee’s decision to make the web public was characteristic; throughout his career, he has been a mensch . . . In place of the usual [tech book] tics―the uncritical fetishization of AI, the insistence that technological advances will serve as a panacea, and the accompanying refusal to engage with political or philosophical questions―Berners-Lee is quite explicit that social conditions shape how technologies are deployed. He knows better than anyone that ‘the free, open access communications paradigm we have did not arrive like magic. It was the product of a fair amount of political wrangling,’ much of which he is responsible for.” ―Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post “Berners-Lee gave the online world not just a technology but an attitude. Call it a credo or . . . an aesthetic. It’s in the slogan he uses as his title: This Is for Everyone . Along with other Internet pioneers, he believed that the essential tools―shared protocols and software―should be available to everyone free of charge. No company or government should control the web―that was his vision . . . Nothing could be further from the early hopes of Tim Berners-Lee; yet he remains an optimist by nature.” ―James Gleick, The New York Review of Books “Part memoir, part manifesto, Berners-Lee’s chirpy book This Is for Everyone is both an engaging history of the origins and evolution of the web and an ingenious road map for how we can reclaim control over our digital lives. His big idea, which has now become his latest personal obsession, is to restore data sovereignty to every individual by redesigning the web . . . To his credit, the seventy-year-old Berners-Lee is still fighting to preserve the web’s original promise, which, he argues, has been despoiled by malign users, rapacious corporations and authoritarian governments.” ―John Thornhill, Financial Times “ This Is for Everyone is a cool breath of air in an overheated room. Berners-Lee literally invented the world wide web, and he’s clear-eyed about the benefits and the dangers. The book is a reminiscence about how the web came into being, and contains some very sharp thinking about what we need to do now. The personality that comes through is charming, clever, self-effacing, interesting and thoughtful about his creation.” ―Naomi Alderman, The Observer (London) “Tim Berners-Lee’s This Is for Everyone is more than just an autobiography. This book is an insightful recounting of the development of the World Wide Web and a profound declaration on how humanity should remain at the center of technology as we move forward in the twenty-first century.” ―Al Gore, former US vice president “ This Is for Everyone takes us on a journey with this incredibly important man and his work