It was 25 years ago that a British engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), wrote a proposal to his boss that for what would finally become the World Wide Web. He presented the paper on March 12, 1989, and the WWW was born.

Interestingly, Tim’s proposal was initially rejected by his boss at the Swiss Physics laboratory, CERN. It wasn’t accepted until he proposed the three technologies - HTML (HyperText Markup Language), URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). Finally, these three formed the foundation of www. They are still in use.

In the beginning, the webpages were static, read-only text pages. Images would open in another browser window.

The turning point in the history of WWW came with the launch of Mosaic web browser, in 1993. It popularized WWW as search became easy.

      

CERN played an important role in popularising WWW by waiving off its royalties, in April 1993. Now, innovations started happening and private money was pumped in. Now, the world was changed. Internet companies like Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook were developed. And the world was never same again. WWW became an integral part of our life.

WWW inventor Tim now wants that WWW should be free of government influence. Its independent nature should be protected. In an interview to Guardian, he expressed concern that the web had come under increasing attacks from the government and corporate influence.

There is need for new rules to protect the open neutral system.