The World Wide Web Goes Public: Berners-Lee Connects Humanity
CERN director-general Christopher Llewellyn Smith announced on April 30, 1993, that the World Wide Web would be free for anyone to use, with no licensing fees or royalties. Tim Berners-Lee had invented the Web at CERN in 1989 as a way for physicists to share documents. The decision to release it royalty-free was not inevitable; the University of Minnesota had begun charging licensing fees for the competing Gopher protocol just months earlier, prompting an exodus of developers to the Web. Berners-Lee has estimated that he could have earned billions from licensing but believed the Web needed to be an open platform to succeed. Within 18 months, Netscape Navigator launched. Within three years, there were 100,000 websites. Today there are over 1.8 billion.
April 30, 1993
33 years ago
Key Figures & Places
What Else Happened on April 30
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