Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, took the stage at Wave by Vento, a Turin-based initiative focused on technological development, and delivered a message that cuts straight to the core of today’s digital economy: technology advances fast, but data control must stay with people.
Berners-Lee launched the web as we know it in 1989, while working at CERN in Geneva. The following year he built the first browser and the first server, both primitive by modern standards but fully operational given the connection speeds of nearly four decades ago. He then defined the foundational protocols HTML, HTTP, and URI, which power every website today. In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to preserve open standards and interoperability across the internet.
At the Turin event, this architect of the modern internet chose to look forward rather than backward, addressing the most pressing questions in technology today: from Web3 startups and artificial intelligence to the risks of unchecked technological control by a handful of corporations.
The Invention That Rewired Technology and the Economy
The technological sector moves at a pace that makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish which inventions will define history and which will prove to be mere milestones in a seemingly unstoppable march of progress. The World Wide Web leaves no room for doubt. It represents a clear dividing line in economic and technological history, a before and an after that reshaped entire industries within a single generation.
The original Web gave every user the ability to create a site and link it to others through hypertext, the foundational architecture of the internet ecosystem. That single design decision carried enormous consequences. The Web created new markets and amplified existing ones, spawned companies and advertising platforms, invented digital publishing, and built from scratch entire sectors of the economy now considered essential infrastructure. The modern media industry, e-commerce, cloud computing, and social networking all trace their roots to that 1989 proposal from a CERN engineer.
Data and Open Source: The Next Digital Battlegrounds
The web today looks nothing like it did in 1989, and Berners-Lee is acutely aware of that shift. When users no longer visit sites directly but instead receive answers from increasingly sophisticated language models, the incentives for publishers, content creators, and platforms change fundamentally. That shift makes it urgent to preserve an ecosystem built on the same philosophy that underpinned the web 37 years ago: one where content, services, and technologies continue to interact freely.
Open source sits at the center of Berners-Lee’s vision for what comes next. He views with strong approval the possibility that artificial intelligence, the defining technological lever of our era, develops through models open to everyone, much as the Web did, and much as widely adopted software like Wikipedia did before ChatGPT arrived. Wikipedia, Berners-Lee suggested, is effectively the ancestor of the large language models now reshaping how people access information.
Openness alone, though, is not enough. Common standards are required, and those standards must be respected. The principle of building interoperable technologies, available without licensing costs, that underpins the W3C’s charter remains just as relevant in the age of AI. The danger Berners-Lee flags is concentration: if the most powerful frontier models are controlled by a small number of actors, they risk becoming a serious systemic risk to society, a concern echoed recently by European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde.
Data Is the Real Point of Emphasis
An AI system becomes far more useful when it has access to contextual information about the user. But that very capability, Berners-Lee argued in Turin, opens a serious question of control.
“Having precise individual control over one’s own data and having common interoperability standards for AI must remain a shared and collective goal.”
He made this point with particular emphasis from the Turin stage. Data has become one of the primary sources of value in the new economy, arguably the primary one. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the emerging AI Act both reflect this recognition at a regulatory level, but Berners-Lee’s argument goes further: regulation alone is not enough without architectural principles that keep users in control by design.
If all the personal information fed into generative models remains locked inside a single platform, the result is a further concentration of power in the hands of the largest technology operators. The user must retain control at all times, deciding personally which data to share, with which applications, and under what conditions. This is not a new concern for Berners-Lee: his Solid project, developed at MIT, has spent years trying to build exactly this kind of user-controlled data layer on top of the web.
The value that must never drift from the web’s story, across what promises to be a long and prosperous life for this infrastructure, is simple: it must remain, always and above all, in the service of people. Not of powerful tech entrepreneurs. That principle was true in 1989. Berners-Lee made clear in Turin that it must still be true in 2025 and beyond.
