This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

The man who invented the World Wide Web recaps its spectacular growth and ponders its uncertain future in this knotty memoir-cum-manifesto. Berners-Lee (Weaving the Web) begins by revisiting his achievement while a programmer in Switzerland in 1990 of conceiving and writing the software—URL addresses, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) and Hypertext Markup Language (html)—that lets users access websites, files, and images from other computers on their own. He continues on to his stint as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, where he warded off attempts to turn the web into a patchwork of proprietary networks and fought for “net neutrality,” the principle that service providers should allow equal access to all web content. When the account wanders into Berners-Lee’s techno-optimism, however, it’s not always consistent or convincing. He pushes at great length a scheme called “Solid” to enable individuals to control their own data by placing it in digital “pods” in ways that sound fuzzy and dull. He’s bullish on AI, but fails to support his assertion that it can analyze a person’s data to help them “understand better who [they] really [are].” As an account of the web’s conception, this captivates, but as a forecast of what’s to come, it underwhelms. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)