Tim Berners-Lee — "I’m not happy with the way some companies use the web to exploit people."
I’m not happy with the way some companies use the web to exploit people.
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More from Tim Berners-Lee
"The web is not about technology, it's about people."
"The web is a mirror of society, and it reflects our best and worst traits."
"The web is a powerful force for good, but it can also be a powerful force for evil. We need to make sure it's used for good."
"I regret that I put two slashes in the URL. It was unnecessary."
"The web was designed to be decentralized, but it’s becoming more centralized."
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
The web's creator expresses frustration that corporations have turned a tool built for open knowledge-sharing into an instrument of manipulation and profit. He criticizes practices like invasive data harvesting, manipulative algorithms, dark design patterns that trick users, and business models built on exploiting personal information without genuine consent. The web was meant to empower people, not be weaponized against them by companies prioritizing engagement and revenue over user dignity.
Relevance to Tim Berners-Lee
Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 at CERN and released it royalty-free, believing it belonged to humanity. He founded the W3C to protect open standards and later launched the Solid project to return data ownership to individuals. He publicly criticized Facebook and Google's data practices and authored the Contract for the Web. This quote reflects his lifelong mission: the web should serve people's interests, never be turned against them.
The era
Berners-Lee made this criticism repeatedly in the 2010s and 2020s, a period defined by surveillance capitalism, the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposing Facebook's data abuses, GDPR legislation in Europe, and widespread debate over algorithmic manipulation and attention harvesting. Tech giants built trillion-dollar empires on users' behavioral data collected without meaningful consent. The web he envisioned as a free, open commons had been colonized by advertising-driven platforms prioritizing engagement over human welfare.
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