578. Alastair and Michael Gove Disagree Agreeably on Brexit and Israel
8 October 2026
153. The Man Who Invented The Internet (Tim Berners-Lee)
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Leading
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15 September 2025
Tim Berners-Lee could be one of the richest men on the planet, why did he forfeit such large profits to make the world wide web a free and open space? How do we reclaim the internet from social media companies taking away our sovereignty? Have tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk thanked Tim for his invention?
Rory and Alastair are joined by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to discuss all this and more.
Visit HP.com/politics to find out more.
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Alastair,
There was a glaring point that you and Rory missed in your analysis of Tim’s potential financial gains he could have made from the web.
The point is this:
If he had charged for it, it would never have taken off.
If he had charged people couple of quid per month to use it, a LOT less people would have ever used it, or build a website in the first place.
Competing companies using different networking protocols would have emerged, and you would have had fragmentation. Nothing like the web we use today. The internet could have remained an obscure thing that only nerds knew existed for decades, or even forever, without someone like Tim stepping up to urge everyone to use one standard way of communicating across it.
Many folks in the computer science world could have done the technical stuff that Tim has done. He’s not a genius for coming up with a networking protocol (HTTP), or a document format (HTML)
His real achievement is choosing to make it free, such that it could grow and become a tool for the good of all humanity; and doing the hard follow-up work to make web standards stay as one standard.
I often considered how rich Tim could have been if he charged £10/mo for people to use it – but the answer is this:
Not very rich at all, actually, and the web would not be anything close to “world wide” as a result.
Food for thought I hope!