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Berners-Lee is more diplomatic. He has no gripe about commerce on the Web. (He buys CDs there.) And it was inevitable, in retrospect, that much Web activity would be, well, passive, with people absorbing content from high-volume sites. But he'd hoped the ratio of active to passive would be higher. It irks him that most Website-editing software is so cumbersome. Even the software that spares you the drudgery of actually looking at HTML code calls for some heavy lifting. You chisel your text in granite and then upload the slab, after which changes are difficult. "The Web," he complains, "is this thing where you click around to read," but if you want to write, "you have to go through this procedure." As Cailliau puts it, people have come to view the Web as "just another publishing medium. That was definitely not our intention." Berners-Lee, it turns out, is a kind of accidental Gutenberg.
Berners-Lee considers the Web an example of how early, random forces are amplified through time. "It was an accident of fate that all the first [commercially successful] programs were browsers and not editors," he says. To see how different things might have been, you have to watch him gleefully wield his original browser--a browser and editor--at his desk. He's working on one document and--flash--in a few user-friendly keystrokes, it is linked to another document. One document can be on his computer "desktop"--for his eyes only--another can be accessible to his colleagues or his family, and another can be public. A seamless neural connection between his brain and the social brain.
What if the "accident of fate" hadn't happened? What if Berners-Lee's browser-editor, or some further evolution of it, had become the Web tool that first reached the masses? The world almost found out. In 1992, two years after he created his browser, and before Andreessen's Mosaic browser existed, he and Cailliau consulted a lawyer about starting a company called Websoft (the name has since been taken). But the project held risks, and besides, Berners-Lee envisioned competitors springing up, creating incompatible browsers and balkanizing the Web. He thought it better to stay above the fray and try to bring technical harmony. "Tim's not after the money," says Cailliau in a tone of admiration perhaps tinged with regret. "He accepts a much wider range of hotel-room facilities than a CEO would."
Berners-Lee admits to no regrets at having taken the high-minded, low-profit route. He says he is grateful that Andreessen co-authored a user-friendly browser and thus brought the Web to the public, even if in non-ideal form. Yet it can't have been easy watching Andreessen become the darling of the media after writing a third-generation browser that lacked basic editing capabilities. When I ask, "So there was a moment when you might have been Marc Andreessen?" Berners-Lee says, "I suppose so," and then smiles in a slightly stiff, even frosty, way. "The world is full of moments when one might be other things," he says. "One is the decisions one's taken." File closed.