I remember when the internet was free; free the way Tim Berners-Lee envisaged it. The service provider had to be paid, of course, but all the content on the net was free. It’s only with the ability to look back and remember it that it’s possible to recognise just how much the World Wide Web has been pirated by big business, money, criminality, and all the negative impacts those have had on our capability to own and run it in the way Berners-Lee wanted.
“I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone…” Tim Berners-Lee 28th September 2025
What could have been a wondrous opportunity for humankind has been squandered and distorted into a monster fed by the avarice of those who would seek to personally benefit, to the deprivation of the rest of us. So powerful have these few become that society’s rules and regulations are ignored, flouted in their obsessive desires to control and increase their power.
When I was a young man in the UK it was assumed the government ran everything and made the decisions that affected, and hopefully improved our lives. Lobbying was not a word I was even aware of at that time. The government passed regulations that seemed to keep corporations in check and ensure most things were done in keeping with those regulations.
Keynesian economics and the use of regulation and government regulatory bodies helped keep businesses in line. Some were controlled and owned by the government themselves: railways, water companies and a host of others.
Of course, everyone complained they were paying too much tax, but it was a much fairer system than today, with both businesses and private individuals paying a fair share. For example, by the mid 1960’s the Beatles were all multi-millionaires. They complained that 95% of their income was taken as tax, but even after tax they were still millionaires.
Then along came three powerful people who were to change the whole course of history. Thatcher, Reagan and Friedman.
Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s first woman prime minister and an ardent Conservative, the party of business.
Ronald Reagan was then President of the United States, little qualified for the job, but with an ego equivalent to any other Hollywood film star.
Milton Friedman had made a name for himself as a hard-bitten economist who spent much of his career downplaying Keynesian economics in favour of his own economic interpretations that eventually became known as ‘Monetarism’, or, ‘Trickle Down Economics’.
Thatcher and Reagan seized on Friedman’s ideas and sold off most of the state-owned industries, often at knock-down prices. Thatcher, in particular, became obsessed with Friedman’s theories and a mass privatization began with her and was continued by John Major, her successor as prime minister after Thatcher was eventually ousted by her own party.
Was Friedman right in his opinions and calculations? He was well lauded by his peers, but the idea that privatization and the cutting of taxes to business would encourage the increase in profits to trickle down to the man in the street was never forthcoming.
Instead, the so-called captains of industry grew immensely wealthy and more powerful. Living standards for the vast majority of the population, both in the UK and the USA, gradually declined. Private investors in the new privatized companies grew richer, while a lack of investment in infrastructure by the companies themselves, no longer subject to strong government regulation, meant services became rapidly poorer while household bills for essentials like energy and water rose rapidly.
It was the perfect example of the rich getting richer and the poor becoming even poorer.
As companies benefited from the increased profits they began to expand. Takeovers of smaller businesses became the norm, until for many the move from national to international was inevitable. Huge conglomerates were formed. Immensely powerful, they no longer saw governments as a restraining influence, but only there to serve their needs. They began to control government ministers by a process of lobbying and corrupt incentives. A regulation that was inhibiting a company’s ability to profit could be changed or overlooked, environmental laws flouted or altered to no longer be an inhibiter to profit. Corruption was no longer seen as a crime, but merely a way to do business.
And so along came Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and the rest of the Silicon Valley fast rising companies who had seen the internet as the pot of gold that never stops giving. Thanks to Reagan, Thatcher and Friedman no company was paying 95% of their profits in tax anymore. Let the tax burden fall on the working man.
The meteoric rise of Silicon Valley companies not only brought wealth galore to those in control, but also immense power. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web but never pretended to own it. He saw it as a means to connect people, bring them together. Silicon Valley stole the World Wide Web from under his nose, and under ours.
The internet is now a worldwide money-machine. An endless advertising hoarding; huge algorithmic platforms spewing out authoritarian propaganda while continuing to manufacture vast fortunes for those in control.
Enough to purchase their very own President.