Tim Berners-Lee — "Governments must treat the internet as a basic utility—like water."
Governments must treat the internet as a basic utility—like water.
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More from Tim Berners-Lee
"I'm not saying the web is all bad. It has done a lot of good. But it's also done a lot of harm."
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About Tim Berners-Lee (born 1955)
British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989 and founded the W3C, championing open web standards. Closely associated with Vint Cerf (TCP/IP co-creator and 'father of the internet') and Marc Andreessen (Mosaic browser creator and Netscape co-founder). For an intellectual contrast, see Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook (Meta) founder — Zuckerberg's walled-garden Facebook is the canonical contemporary opposite of Berners-Lee's open-web vision; Berners-Lee's Solid project and 'recapture the web' essays are explicitly written as a rebuttal to the platform-monopoly model Facebook pioneered.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Internet access should be treated as an essential public service, not a luxury or commodity subject to market forces. Like water, it is necessary for modern participation—in education, commerce, healthcare, and civic life. Governments should guarantee universal, affordable access rather than leaving it entirely to private providers, who may exclude the poor or throttle service for profit.
Relevance to Tim Berners-Lee
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and deliberately declined to patent it, making it a global commons. Through the World Wide Web Foundation, he campaigned for universal access as a human right. Having built the web as open infrastructure for all, his insistence that governments—not just markets—must guarantee access is the logical culmination of his life's defining act.
The era
By the 2010s and 2020s, net neutrality battles raged in the US and Europe while authoritarian governments routinely shut down internet access during protests. Billions remained offline despite smartphones spreading rapidly. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how digital exclusion meant educational and economic exclusion. Broadband debates, global digital divides, and ISP monopoly power made the utility-framing politically urgent.
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