The man who built the web wants to fix it

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim-Berners Lee, during a conference at the Talent Arena, at the Fira de Barcelona, on 3 March 2026, in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Lorena Sopena/Europa Press via Getty Images

Decades after inventing the web, Tim Berners-Lee is still defending it.

This time, he's not talking about browsers or bandwidth but about business models. Onstage in Barcelona at Talent Arena on March 3, Berners-Lee said many of today’s platforms are designed to maximize engagement and what drives engagement is not measured debate but outrage, fear and extreme content.

"When you put in the addictive algorithm, you do it deliberately," he said, pushing back on the idea that these systems are inevitable.

Berners-Lee conceived the web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to help scientists share information across institutions. The idea was simple. At CERN, knowledge moved ...