When Sir Tim Berners-Lee first came up with the idea for the World Wide Web back in 1989, his vision for it could be likened to a digital Library of Alexandria, with all human knowledge centralized, a cooperative attitude, and most of all, free. Fast-forward about 37 years, and while the Web did indeed bring the world together, it's fair to say that it didn't do so quite in the manner that Berners-Lee hoped for.
In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee discusses where exactly things went wrong, and how they can perhaps be fixed in what he describes as "a battle for the soul of the web," noting that "it's not too late." The Web had a fairly peaceful early start without ads, heavy commercialization, and cleanly served the purposes of information and some entertainment, but started shifting around the late '90s with the dot-com boom and "charlatans", in Berners-Lee's view.
