Tim Berners-Lee: The Web and Democracy

May 7, 2005 4:55 PM

I'm trying to find an old article about Tim Berners-Lee and the relationship between the WWW and democracy. There was a quote that went something like: "Tim built democracy into the fabric of the web."

I've searched Google and turned up some related stuff; remarks by TBL about the web and democracy and so forth, but I can't seem to find this article about the relationship. I don't recall if it was a print or online piece, but I seem to remember reading it about 3 to 5 years ago, if that is any help.

posted by idontlikewords to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I couldn't find it online either. It sounds like something that would be in the book republic.com, but that's a wild guess. (maybe you read that a while back?)
posted by null terminated at 7:32 PM on May 7, 2005

Are you interested in the exact quote, or any good substantive explanation of the democratic nature of Internet architecture? If the former, I can't help; if the latter, try "the end of end to end" by Lawrence Lessig. Google knows where it is.
posted by rkent at 10:10 PM on May 7, 2005

The quote is from a long answer Berners-Lee gave during the q&a at the WWW8 Conference, in Toronto, May 1999.
posted by MLIS at 8:25 AM on May 8, 2005

oops, please disregard and I'll see if I can find the article for you.
posted by MLIS at 8:46 AM on May 8, 2005

Unfortunately, the democracy TBL built into the Web long ago via the W3C has become a red-tape bureaucracy that takes ages to get anything done. Now it's the various open source developers that get the job done.
posted by bkdelong at 7:21 PM on May 8, 2005

A friend suggested you check Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts - The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution by Steve Lohr as he thought he remembered the issue addressed there.
posted by MLIS at 9:36 AM on May 20, 2005