YouSaid · the spoken record

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Persuading them that one web was going to be really good, that if you have just one web, it would take off exponentially. If we had many little webs, they would each one die. So I think people realized that. They managed to persuade their governance within their platforms, their managers, their boards to make this one web. And they knew that if they fought over incompatible versions of HTML then the web would not take off like it would if they made one web, if they made it one web, then one web would take off and become huge and then they're part of that web would be itself huge.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Adopt your standards and say, we actually have to be good stewards of the collective because that doesn't seem like a thing that could maybe happen today. But you were able to do it at the outset of the web. How'd you”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, at the beginning of the web, you made a lot of people with a lot of power agree to participate in some standards, right? You made them agree to participate in browser standards. There was a ferocious competition in browsers at that time. It seems like we're about to enter a period of ferocious competition in browsers again, which I want to come to. But at that time, at the beginning of the web, there was a lot of competition in browsers. Microsoft was brought to heel in an antitrust case because there was such ferocious competition in browsers. How did you go about convincing all of those companies and all of those people?”
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 there's two things about TikTok really. One is that it's not really part of the web, but it's an app. But the other is that when you get onto TikTok, the algorithms on TikTok are addictive. And so when they build the people, you know who you are, you're building the TikTok back end, you're building the UX and you make it so that you optimize the AI so that people will be kept on the platform. So I'm not on TikTok. I get videos on YouTube, on YouTube. I find that I can, you know, I can stop scrolling through the, I don't end up scrolling through forever. If I was on TikTok, I'd probably end up scrolling through forever. When you have such great power as you're a dominant player like TikTok, then you have a lot of responsibility. You have a responsibility to all the people on it that you respect them.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about this is for everyone now, the argument I hear from so many of the platform CEOs who come onto the show say, yes, we are in control of a lot of things. Yes, we are in control of a lot of data. Yes, we feel like monopolies to a lot of people, but we've given so many more people tools to express themselves. TikTok might be a closed platform that doesn't really play all that well with the web. But we've given many, many millions of people more tools to express themselves and reach an audience. That's their argument, right? And I hear that argument virtually every day. I'm curious for your perspective on the opposite side of the argument, right? That that has actually closed down a version of the web that is closed down a type of freedom, a type of digital sovereignty. How would you make the argument in response?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Came from when I was given the chance to participate in the London Olympics. It was an amazing moment. I got an email from Danny Boyle saying, do you want to come to my office and let's talk about the Olympics opening ceremony? Got to sit down and type a few words on an old next computer on the stage in the stadium. And when I return, then that phrase would go around the stadium in LED lights and then off over the internet. So we decided this is for everyone as a way of really encapsulating what was most important about 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
“This brings me to your book. It's called This Is For Everyone. That seems like the heart of the book that you should have more agency as you operate on the internet that you should be able to publish and consume as you wish. Explain how you came to that phrase and how you think about that phrase in the context of the internet that we all experience today”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Days of the web. Anybody used to be able to make a website, that feeling of sovereignty as an individual being enabled and being a peer with all the other people on the web, that is what we are still fighting for and in fact we need to rebuild.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, when you have a market and a network, then you end up with monopolies. Now, that's the way markets work. So bit by bit, we've seen originally, you know, yeah, there was a time before Chrome was totally dominant when there was a reasonable market for different browsers. Now people, Chrome is dominant. There was a time before Google Search came along that there were a number of search engines and so on. But now we have basically one search engine, we have basically one social network. We have basically one marketplace, which is a problem for real people, problem for people like you trying to just make your way in the world, be a journalist, and you want to really, you want that feeling that your peer with everybody else. You want to have control of your own destiny. We call it digital sovereignty. In the old days of the early...”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A reason I want to start there because I think understanding how you feel about it will inform so much of the questions I have for you. That tension between YouTube is on the web, but all the videos on YouTube are not available in other players. There's no ecosystem of open YouTube players that can access that database of videos. Podcasts are really interesting. Apple effectively maintains a central database of podcasts and all the podcast players use it. And so that tension between where does a centralization lie and where does the open ecosystem live and what's the relation between the two of them? To me, it feels like the centralized players always end up exerting more and more dominance over the ecosystem, right? And maybe that has been inexorable over the past few years, but I'm curious how you see it.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bit like keeping some bookmarks on the first original browser. And so to a certain extent podcast, they work well. But if people end up on the app and then being tracked and not using the podcast app, they're not, all that tension is huge right now 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
“See a lot of things which end up on YouTube, which is on the web. So things in general, most of the things I'm involved in, they end up on the web, but people might constantly sort of, you know, New York Times is constantly saying please download the app or BBC says please use the app. They always try to persuade you to use the app because then they have more control. They can track you better, but also there's with podcasts particularly I use a podcast program, a generic podcast app which I can listen to any podcast with and so that for me that's like you know the web as it should be. You can send me a link to a podcast or you can search for it and I can put it in my keep of all hundreds of podcasts I'm interested in on it's”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are also the author of a new memoir called This Is For Everyone, which is about the web and the future of the web. I have a lot to talk to you about. I was just reflecting before we began this conversation that my entire career exists because of the web and the democratic access to publishing that the web afforded me and millions of other people. And that feels like it's all changing. The frame that I use when I talk to everybody at the web is that if we were starting the Verge today, I don't know that we would start a website. In 2011, when we started our site, it was the only choice. That was the thing that we were definitely going to do. We were going to start a big website with lots of functionality. And over the past 14 years, it feels like the thing we would do today is start at like a video channel on a closed platform, like a walled garden platform. And I just wanted to ask you from the start, do you see that shift that new information is most often going into closed platforms?”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something like that ever happen again, and could it happen for an AI powered web? Is there a future where decentralization wrestles some power away from big tech and back to the end user? I think you'll find Tim's perspective here really insightful. Okay, sir, Tim Berners-Lee. Here we go. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, you are the inventor of the World Wide Web and co founder and CTO of Inrupt. Welcome to Dakoder.”
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 really wanted to dig into all of this with Tim to see whether he believes whether the spirit in which he invented the web could somehow be reborn in the era we live in today. That vision was one where inventors, academics, and the open source community collaborated with the tech industry to build something bigger than any one product or platform. And even though they may not have all agreed on what direction the web should take, they all had huge incentives to join together on big initiatives like the W3C Web Standards Body that Tim founded more than three decades ago.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'll hear him explain here why he's excited about generative AI and in particular personal assistance, including one that he helped develop at Interrupt called Charlie. We spent a lot of time here in Dakota over the past couple years talking through the implications of AI for the open web generally. More broadly, how closed ecosystems have diminished the web as an information platform, even though it's increased its importance as an application layer. Everywhere we look, though, AI is threatening the web in new and interesting ways. There's the rise of Google's AI-powered search results, the new browser wars happening between OpenAI and its competitors, and a full-on breakdown of the web's social contract, thanks to AI firms hungry for training data, they'd rather not pay for.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Optimism about the web and what it can do. But he's also concerned that we've strayed too far from his original vision of the web as a democratizing force for knowledge and creativity. All of that plays a major thematic role in his new memoir. This is for everyone, which is about the growth of the web and how he thinks we might be able to salvage its best parts and make something better. You'll hear Tim explain the title itself, was coined as part of a segment he contributed to the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London. It's kind of the purest distillation of what he's always wanted the web to be, and he sincerely believes in it. So Tim and I talked about all of that, as well as his current work at the decentralization startup Inrupt, which works on the open source solid standard, and of course where AI fits into this conversation about the future of the web. Tim has for a long time been talking about an idea he's called the semantic web, or a web that's readable and traversable by machines.”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Dakoda. I'm Neil I Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Dakoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with a very special guest, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim is a legend in the history of the Internet. He created HTML, the standard language for creating and structuring web pages, and the HTTP protocol that browsers and servers used to communicate. It doesn't really get more foundational than that. Tim was there at the very, very beginning of the modern internet. But right now, in a lot of ways, it feels like maybe we're at the end of that grand world-changing project. Tim has been sounding the alarm about where the web has gone wrong for years now. You can go back and read headline after headline to see his increasingly dire warnings about what's happened to life on the internet. From the concentration of power in big tech platforms to the detrimental effects of social media. Now, Tim isn't exactly a pessimist. You'll hear on our conversation that he still has a lot of”
2025-11-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t think AI will destroy the web · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT