In context: The original World Wide Web software was developed by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while he was working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The novel information system was designed to promote faster and easier information sharing within the scientific community. It turned into an everyday commodity and entertainment routine for billions of people worldwide.

On April 30, 2023, the public version of the World Wide Web turned exactly 30 years old. In 1993, CERN decided to put the "W3 software" into public domain (PD), a seemingly simple decision that sparked what is likely the most fundamental technology revolution in modern times. Though things are rather different now, the web is still the main daily drive for more than 5 billion people – two-thirds of the worldwide population – relying on the internet for research, industry, communications, and entertainment.

The W3 platform was first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 as an information management system based on connections existing between information. The "hypertext system" was created on a NeXTStep machine in 1990, and in very few years it won over many scientific and educational organizations beyond CERN. Of course, the main reason behind W3's early success was the fact the Geneva-based institution decided to give everyone the software for free.

CERN has released the internal document that marked the PD status of the World Wide Web in 1993. Signed by Director of Research Walter Hoogland and Director of Administration Helmut Weber, it briefly described the W3 project as a "global computer networked information system" providing a collaborative information system independent of hardware and software platform, or even physical location.

Access to information through W3 is provided "via a hypertext model," the document continues, on a world wide network that is designed to work regardless of the information format and the client's operating system. The PD software release included a "basic" W3 client, a server and a library of common code, to which CERN relinquished all intellectual property rights for both source and binary code.

In 1993, proper copyright licensing standards were still in their development phase. A year later, CERN adopted an open-source license for the next version of the software. This way, the organization retained copyright while anyone could use and modify the W3 platform as they wished. However, the initial PD release has arguably allowed the web to "grow into the giant it is today," CERN says.

Walter Hoogland now says that "the public release was the best thing" CERN could have done with the W3 project, a move which reflected CERN's code values of "open collaboration for the benefit of society."

That open collaboration and information-sharing principle of the original W3 platform is still alive today, even though the web is increasingly being turned into siloed, proprietary platforms where information is collected, sold or even weaponized for the sake of Big Tech corporations or powerful, socially problematic individuals like Elon Musk. ChatGPT , the generative AI which exploited the free web to create one of the most hyped technology products in recent times, is just the latest iteration of this troubling phenomenon.