While I was reading a news article about the World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, one question that kept occurring in my mind was what would’ve happened if he chose to patent his invention. When he created that first ever hyperlinked text in an HTML page and helped setup the first ever web server of the world, little would he have imagined that his discovery would help the world grow leaps and bounds in just over a decade. In fact, it didn’t even take it a decade for the world to benefit from the power of the WWW, that it is virtually impossible today to imagine our lives without it. Today, WWW is synonymous to internet for most of us.
I started a pet project to find out how much Berners-Lee could’ve been richer if he had chosen for the patent and slapped a royalty fees to the usage of WWW. I progressed a bit over the last week, but soon I realized that it is a futile exercise, because the web is often much more than it meets the eyes of all of us. There are too many dark, invisible areas to the web. The information that is accessible to all of us through search engines barely scratches the total amount of info available in the web. It is superficial, while there is the real treasure house, lying dormant and often invisible to the public, deep inside, which run from huge databases with terabytes of information and are dynamically created based on search queries and depending on the context of such queries. I searched on the web, and found this whitepaper about such a thing called deep web. The paper is very lengthy that I didn’t have the patience to go through it completely, and so I am not quite sure if it is same as what I am talking about. But, it definitely looks similar.
So, coming back to the question, how much will all this make Bernes-Lee richer, I would say that it is rather an impossible question to answer. Because, if he had chosen to patent his discovery, the world would’ve been indistinguishably different than today.
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