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Sir Tim Berners-Lee

lines on the record: 68
first: 2025-11-10
most recent: 2025-11-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“With BBC, we worked on a project to give people who logged onto the BBC. They would get themselves a little data wallet on the side, which they could, they do have a watch party. And the watch party demoed with, which was real people, or worked using DataWallet, the Flanders government, the way the Flanders government interfaces with the citizens is through these solid compatible data wallets, the founders, which is that speaking part of Belgium interrupt from an interesting connection with Visa at the moment because Visa want to be, they want to make sure that they do the right thing in terms of personal data. by a few weeks ago by Peter about that.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a company, I started to, it's IN for Innovation Rupt for Disruption and Interrupt.com was available in the domain name a few years ago. Inrupt is design to do whatever it takes to bring the solid vision to the ecosystem and what interrupted in fact Dan is to produce the enterprise grade secure scalable version of a data wallet server of a solid protocol compatible server as a protocol ESS the enterprise solid server which is not open source it's engineered to be scalable and secure and worked with a bunch of people who we've brought for example”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That to me feels like for all of the things we've talked about, the future of the web has to happen on mobile, right? I mean, that is where the people are. That is the device that everyone carries around every day. And right now, Apple's decisions about what the web cannot do on mobile are actually the gatekeeper in real ways for most people's experience of the web. And so if you introduce some competition, can you break that? Or do you need to just switch to Android where Google wants you to use the web?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, just for the record, Apple would tell you as loudly as they can that WebKit on the phone is as good as any other browser. And I think most users would tell you that it is not. And that gap is where I think the theories about Apple's development priorities come from. But I'm just asking more hypothetically. We've discussed the web as an application at an all-time high, right? On desktop, if you have a Mac or a Windows PC or Linux, you are using web apps. Like mostly what you're using is applications expressed through web technology, even if they appear to be native, right? Electron and other wrappers are just presenting web apps to you in ways that feel native. That is not true on mobile. It really is not. Even for Google's efforts on Android, right? Progressive web apps on Android have not taken the world by storm. Do you think a more powerful browser on the iPhone would ever change that dynamic? Or do you think people just want apps on phones?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'd have to do, I think it would be interesting to a bunch of tests to find out to what extent this is true. Yes, I've heard rumors that, but I can't substantiate that now Apple is deliberately slowing down WebKit on the phone in order so that not to compete with Apple native apps.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the arguments I've heard for why Apple will not allow other browser engines is that they can artificially restrict WebKit. So it's not as good of a competitor to the native apps on the iPhone as web apps on the desktop R to native apps on the Mac or Windows or whatever. If you had true web apps being able to run in Chromium on the iPhone, if you had that browser competition, there was a much more capable browser. Do you think that would displace how the native apps work? This is where we began the conversation, right? This push to apps because they're more capable on the iPhone. But if you had a browser that was as capable as a desktop browser on the iPhone, do you think that would change the dynamic?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is one other one of note it's WebKit, which is what Apple uses in Safari and the iPhone. It is dominant in its way, building for WebKit is a thing that every mobile developer has to think about all the time because it is dominant on the iPhone. Apple doesn't allow other browser engines on the iPhone. It certainly doesn't allow Chromium. Now, thanks to some EU regulation, it might have to, depending on how some antitrust litigation in the United States goes, it might have to. But up until now, Apple has not allowed anything but WebKit on the iPhone. Even Chrome on the iPhone has a skin over the top of the core browser engine WebKit. Do you think that Apple being made to allow Chromium to run on the iPhone, for example, will actually lead to new browser innovation?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“General both would be nice if there were more than one browser engine around. In fact, there's Chromium, which is a monopoly. It'd be nice if other browser engines were competing, but a browser engine is a big thing to build. So having one way of doing it sometimes software stacks, you have one definitive sort of standard version becomes the standard because you can't afford to have more than one implementation with browser stack. But it's been nice to have more than one.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing I'm really interested about just as we look at the world of browsers being introduced literally just in the past two weeks. There are more new browsers and more big companies interested in browsers in the past two weeks than maybe the past five years. Again, OpenAI has Atlas, Proplexity has comment. Google is rolling out the features in Chrome. Microsoft is rolling out the features in Edge on and on down the line. Atlassian, it's just a big software company just bought the browser company. They have a browser called Dia that does some of these things. All of them are built on the same kind of core browser engine technology, right? Where these are a bunch of Chromium browsers at the end of the day. Do you think there needs to be innovation at that part of the stack that the browser engine itself needs to be where the competition happens? Or is it just the user experience where the competition needs to happen?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could write the protocols. Now, when in fact micropayments is something which we've had projects in WCC every now and again over decades, there have been projects at MIT, for example, for micropayments and so on. crawler or whether you're an individual payment it's the way you want to pay things is going to be very different”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could you build that functionality into the architecture of the web itself to say the different websites, different database owners can say, not unless you pay me, and this is in the standard, and then that would be actually honored by everybody in the ecosystem.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Matthew has been on the show before. We'll have him again. I know what he would say. And I think the economic interest for Cloudflare to do this is also very much aligned, right? Cloudflare on behalf of its customers will tell a bunch of AI companies to go away unless you pay. And Cloudflare and its customers have a deeply aligned economic interest. In many ways, the customers are paying Cloudflare for that service specifically. I'm wondering about you as the architect of the web. Do you think having one centralized provider that can block or deny access to a number of web browsers on economic terms is the right outcome?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's unforeseen. And I'm wondering, is somebody who has seen the development of this from the literal beginning, if you anticipated that twist and if you think Cloudflare having this power over the web is appropriate?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not the person who invented the web, sir. Again, I see that tension. Most of my conversations on Dakota about the web and the future of the web land on this tension. There are some people with power and some people without, and the web is supposed to democratize power.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is on the one hand, it's great that someone has a lot of leverage to push back. On the other hand, it's a centralized provider on the web saying we will control how the web develops. We have the power and we're going to use it. That dynamic is, again, I think it's the tension that animates this conversation, if not the entire web. Is that appropriate? Do you think that's good? Is that how you walk this system to work?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, it's interesting about that. Again, this dynamic between the open ecosystem and the centralized providers, it occurs at every part of this conversation. So no one is listening to robots.txt from what I can tell, right? Which is just, can you crawl my website? And maybe Google still listens to it, but actually Google has another crawler that if you want to be in the search index, you have to allow Google to crawl your site for AI. They have some leverage that they're using. But you have a big centralized service writer in Cloudflare, which has a lot of caching for a lot of websites. And they're saying, we're just going to block the AI crawlers. Like, we have a lot of leverage in the secosystem as well. We will block most of them. The CEO has been very loud about this. And we're going to say we have a new format called the content signals policy. And you got to pay. We're creating leverage by just blocking AI crawlers at every scale.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could certainly design that. I mean, and somatic web technology is a sort of allows you to inform information about information and to write things like rules. So you could suddenly, if you wanted, it would be certainly possible to design and build that system, whether you'd get anybody using it.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The AI companies are not in the business of persuasion. They are in the business of extraction. And it feels like a lot of norms in the internet were not ready for that, right? And by norms, I mean, there's not a system encoded by the W3C about what web browsers can access what websites. There's robots.txt, which is just a file that everyone has sort of handshake agreed to abide by that maybe the companies are abiding by or not. How would you build in a system that gives The owners of data control over the extraction from the AI companies. Could you do it today?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what's interesting about that is your campaign at the beginning of the semantic web era was one of persuasion, right? You were giving talks, you were writing articles saying, open your databases to the web in a structured way so that computers can read them properly and we can have access to all this data and build wonderful things. And that campaign of persuasion is also a campaign of negotiation me is the holder of the database can say, okay, that sounds good. I understand the value that would be created if I do this. I understand the value that I might receive. And here's what I'm willing to give you. And that feels fair, right? Maybe it's good or maybe it's bad. Maybe it will succeed. Maybe it will fail. But the person who has the data has agency, right? And your campaign of persuasion was to convince them to make the decision to give up the data in this way.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Use the Sematic Web to communicate tweets at one interesting possibility is that they communicate with each other. There is a web of data which is generated by AIs and used by AIs and used by people and also mainly used by AIs because AIs find that having, once they've extracted the data, then the most efficient thing is to exchange that data in a semantic way. So yeah, I think to a certain extent because AI solves that problem of conversion of non-sematic data into semantic data, yes, maybe we'll be in for an exciting time of some of the things, the interoperability that we were looking for from the semantic web being available.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the Smithic Web has succeeded to the extent that there's a linked open data world of public databases, of all kinds of things about proteins and geography and the OpenStreetMap and so on. To a certain extent, I suppose succeeded in two ways. That and because on schema.org, schema.org is this project at Google that if you have a website and you want to be recognized by the search engines, then you put metadata in somatic web data, you put machine-readable data on your website, then the Google search engine will build a mental model of your band or whatever your music, whatever it is you're selling. To those ways the link to data group database and that the scenario”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And now, what I'm looking at is a bunch of companies with huge training data needs doing it anyway, right? They can just horsepower through the front end of the website with an AI tool and take the data. Whether or not it was made available under whatever terms they want. That dynamic is, on the one hand, I'm curious, that feels like the vision of the semantic web achieved. Everything is now machine readable because the machines learn to read. Now, on the other hand, it feels extraordinarily extractive, right? It feels unfair to so many people in a way that is just obvious to see. And I don't know that anyone will listen. I don't know that anyone will say, actually, that trade-off was improper, right? It made a lot of people feel bad even though you got to build the tools you want. And I'm curious if you see A, that dynamic, if you see, I'm curious if you see the vision of the semantic web achieved with.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that European governments are very interested in controlling what American tech companies do to their economies, and they will pass some regulations. But I'm not sure that American tech companies will listen. And I think this is the new danger that American tech companies are kind of barreling over various kinds of regulation. Actually, the example I would give to you is the semantic web. You spent years of your life working on a semantic web, a machine-readable web. I think your rallying cry was, give us the raw data, right? Open the databases to browsers, let us build new applications on top of your databases, don't make custom front ends. And this was, you know, when I was young and I was reading your work on it, it was very exciting, right? The idea that we would make the world sort of machine readable and that would create a new class of applications and services and user experiences. As a young person in college, reading your work on that was inspiring. Maybe that happened in some ways and maybe it didn't happen in other ways.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very hard to predict the future there. It's changing so fast and what you end up regulating. One moment you're regulating AI taking over people's jobs in one industry. Next moment you're regulating different industry. Next moment you're worrying about AGI and superintendents. So COSAI is changing so fast I think it's really hard to tell which way things will go in that way. What do you think?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A big split across the Atlantic. Obviously, we see in Europe there's more push towards regulation, there's more activity around regulating, especially American tech companies. I think we see that very clearly. The United States lately under Trump, very deregulatory, especially around AI. The idea that we shouldn't regulate AI for a decade has come up over and over again in this country. Do you think there will be a meaningful split or that European regulation can actually hold some AI companies in check?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't see it happening with market forces. People have Yolare has suggested that we should have regulations for interoperability. I think there's been some talk in Europe about interoperability through regulation.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really hard to tell what users are going to do. But yeah, people trust Apple with their passwords. They trust iCloud to sync them to a certain extent. If that did that with Open Protocols, like if your Apple password sync with iCloud was done using solid login and solid data protocols, then that would be open and interoperable, where people do, they don't have the interoperability between different platforms, but they do have the functionality. They do want the functionality of having somebody in the cloud. And I think you're in the solid ecosystem, you're trusting somebody. You put a lot of stuff in your various data wallets and you trust the data wallet provider to do the right thing with them. So people, to a certain extent, before and after.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you are dead set on having the tightest security possible, you can keep all of your Apple data. You can keep your password. You don't have to sync it to iCloud. And then Apple will tell you that the vast majority of people do this because they forget their passwords. They go to the Apple store and they demand a password reset that the centralized authority has to do for them, right? And there's a real tension between you should be in control and you should give up a lot of control because you need the convenience of somebody else being in charge. And you can see this broadly in the IT space, right? Like users just want an IT administrator to do a lot of things for them. In the AI space where that control carries a lot of risk, right? Someone else will let an AI agent make decisions on your behalf across the web. That's very risky. Do you think that will be enough to push users to saying, actually, I want less convenience and more control?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I'm wondering from my perspective as somebody who's reviewed a lot of consumer products some of these things exist. They're very idealistic. A company like Microsoft will announce a Dropbox storage integration. And then no one uses it because it's vastly less convenient or it's harder to use. Another example I'll give you is”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the subspace is some parts of your lives where it has played out. Like when you zap things in the iCloud, it's not standard. You store Google things stored in your G cloud. Microsoft storage and Microsoft Cloud. So each platform stores stuff. You are in control of that data. So one of the problems is Apple store things can't store stuff in the g-cloud. But for example, when you're using Microsoft software, there's a dropbox integration. So if you have a chocolate box, you can use, from Microsoft point of view, obviously it's not really worried about where it stores the data. So in that area, you can elect to have your Microsoft stuff stored in Dropbox instead of the Microsoft Cloud Stack. So in that area, you are in control of your own data.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why do you think the market hasn't gotten to a place in, let's call it Web 2.0, where users are more in control of their own data? Because we said that in the Web 2.0 era as well, right? Users should be in control of their own data. We should be able to build a massive application ecosystem that connects everybody's data. That was really the heart of the early part of Web 2.0. Whatever it became is something different. But that was a big pushback then, too, right? Users should have a lot.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if that was the right outcome, how come it hasn't happened in the previous versions of the web? That's the dynamic that I'm really curious about. I agree that the right outcome is that users should be in control of their data, that we should be able to make our own choices about what's happening with our data, that we should be able to see and control and restrict that data. And the way that has been expressed may be effective, maybe not, write cookie sheets in Europe, Apple constantly prompting people on the iPhone. But it doesn't seem like users are actually demanding this, right? You do the surveys and consumers say they care a lot about privacy, and then they turn that off and they immediately open Instagram, right? And there's a real disconnect between what people say they want and what they actually look for in the market. And we haven't gotten into a place in sort of any of the versions of the web so far where the data is private and it is local because that's actually what the market demanded. Why do you think that?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As the power of local devices becomes greater and then the amount of stuff which gets stored locally, local first storage, a lot of the things which people are building out there on the web are local first, meaning that, yeah, they're designed to be able to work without the cloud, that their store data either in the web or they store the data on your local device. So the good place to be is that the data is all stored on your local device. The interest is happening on your device and you're in control.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The next turn is bringing out all the way down, right? Making all of that happen locally. So you are totally in control of your data and totally in control of whatever the AI is seeing without it going to someone else's data center. Where do you think we are in that journey and where do you think the right place to end up is?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just putting that in comparison to some of the Agentic browsers that I see today. The first wave of Agentic browsers were all pretty cloud-based, even Google's first attempts were, we're going to run Chrome in a data center for you, and you have to give us all of your logins. We're going to take all of your logins up to the cloud. This is pretty obviously a bad idea, but I think given the AI workload that this involved, they had to do it that way at first. Now we're down to OpenAI is going to ship Atlas, which is an AI-powered browser. It's going to run on your Mac. And just like Chrome on your Mac, all of your passwords and all your data will be on your Mac inside of the browser ecosystem, which is a little more secure. Maybe it's still not as secure as people want with cookies and the like, but so it goes. Then the agent will take action somehow in the browser. And it's actually unclear to me where all the inference is happening, such that the browser can use itself. There's some dynamic between obviously open AI data centers and the browser.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“then there's incentive in the system. There's more value for the user if that data is available to the AI. And so if there's more value to the user, then generally the markets find ways of arranging incentives.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the model is that at the moment DoorJaz has got all that information about all the things you've ordered on DoorDash. But DoorDash only knows the things that you've ordered on DoorDash. Supposes your AI as it did that made a note of everything that you've ordered from DoorDash, but it had a note of all the things it ordered from DoorDash 1, but also from DoorDash 2 and so on, or competitors. So then when you have a world where In fact, the AI which is doing this work for you, it will be able to understand more about what it can recommend that you should buy, what you should eat if it's got information in your data wallet from the various door dashes. So it may be more inclined to collaborate with something with a version of door dash which synchronizes with your data wallet because sharing that information with the AI becomes so valuable.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doordash has been disintermediated by an AI agent. And maybe DoorDash doesn't make enough money. And now we just have a bunch of commodity sandwich providers and they race to the bottom and go out of business. How do you see that playing out? Like where do you find the balance here? I've talked to a lot of these service provider companies over the past year saying, how do you solve this problem? And all of them two hundred one, I think, say, well, we're more valuable than the next one. So of course we won't get commodified, which is basically what everyone always says, right? Like that's basically the answer and then it doesn't play out that way. How would you build that business?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you think that plays out with the applications on the web, though? If I have an AI that's working for me and maybe it's my personal data is in a wallet. Using some of the protocols you've developed at Inrupt, sure. I get it. The AI has to go out onto the web. And then if I want to order a sandwich, it has to go to DoorDash. I call this the DoorDash problem. And then I, the customer, never talk to DoorDash.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do a good job helping you in your life if it doesn't have excess cereal personal data. So it in wrapt rebuild, my company, we've built a version of AI over a thing called Charlie, where it does have access to your personal data in your data wallet. So an AI which does that is much more powerful. I think that without that ability to access on your behalf, without promising to work on your best interests, like your doctor or your lawyer, then doctors and lawyers take oaths and are culturally bound to support the best interests of the client, not of the person who pays them. I think AIs which work for you are going to be really important part of the scene.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do that split. And there's application platform. I'm concerned that if the AI does not feed the search engine, it does not feed the blogs, the podcasts, to the extent that AI reads everything on the web and then helps you live your life by using that. One of the things I talked about in the book is that you need an AI that works for you. If it's only running off the external data out there, the AI.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The interface to lots and lots of applications, and maybe they end up without interfaces at all. And that also feels like it will change the web in huge ways. Do you see that split? And how do you think AI factors into the web as an application platform?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Starting the verge today, I would look at the monetization available to me on the web. I would look at Google in one of its many antitrust cases saying that open web advertising is already in rapid decline. And I would look at the monetization available to me on some closed platform like TikTok and say, well, that's better. So I would put the information there. And so the split that I see is that the web is an information platform is in decline. It just feels like there's not new information on the web in the way that there's new ideas and new information on some of the closed platforms. But the web is an application platform, a place where you can deploy an application and get to millions of users outside the strictures of an app store, outside the structures of whatever an operating system might let you do. That feels like it's at an all-time high, right? I mean, that's where all the action is. And that split is really interesting because AI reduces the value of the web as an application platform.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“using AI as your first port of call is exciting. Yes, I do worry about the infrastructure of the web when it comes to the stack of the flow of data which is produced by people who make their money from advertising if nobody's actually following through the links if people are not using search engine they're not actually using the websites then we lose that flow of ad revenue so that whole model crumbles so i do worry about that”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are people in there. There are people like Demisabis, who has called for so that some of those people, if you have a government-funded or philanthropically funded nonprofit, and you invited to it all of those people who've expressed a concern, then you could maybe put them together and build something like a CERN for AI. But I think it's going to be a very tough job trying to get most of the payers out there too. Slow down for a second.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I swear about Andreason specifically is he's obviously a character now in a big way. He was a character at the beginning. He might understand that making one network, one AI network, as opposed just as we made one web, would create exponential growth across the ecosystem. But I don't see him making that argument. What do you think would convince some of these players, even the players who've had the history of how big the web got to make that argument? What would tip them over into actually collaboration makes the market bigger?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think they hijacked. They did try to originally with Mosaic, they tried to absolutely brand it as mosaic. You will find it on Mosaic, not you'll find it on the web. But they lost that battle the moment Microsoft came along and there was a battle between Microsoft and Netscape. They lost the battle to Brandez, Mosaic. So I've never been against commercialization. Advertising has been a really important part of it. Models, lots of different business models, I think has always been important for the web.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the characters in AI now that people are obviously aware of is Mark Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz. He is one of the world's richest people. He's driving a lot of AI development. He's investing in a lot. He was there at the beginning of the web. He obviously created Mosaic, the browser, and the Netscape. There was a profile view in the New Yorker recently. And you said in that that you felt Andreessen hijacked the internet, your creation, to do something wasn't intended to do to commercial.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That'd be done. I mean, I'm just looking at the companies in the AI space. OpenAI seems unconstrained by any outside forces. Anthropic, I think, is a little more constrained. They're very enterprise focused, but they're also pushing as hard. You can just go down the list, right? All the big AI companies, they don't seem constrained or willing to accept constraint. The personality is driving the development of AI almost religiously idealistic in nature. Could you get them in a room and say you actually have to behave yourselves? And this will be bigger if we work together or constrain the capabilities.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of people would wonder about whether you could make it, can you make it with AI? There is no WTC for AI, which is bringing everybody together in one room. Some people have suggested there should be something like a sort of CERN for AI, some big hydrophysics lab in some big international lab, which develops AI so that you can really optimize both the developer of AI but also the prevention of the thing running away that you can build containers around it, for example.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT