Tim Berners-Lee

“It's amazing how quickly people on the internet can pick something up, but it's also amazing how quickly they can drop it.”

“Everybody who runs a Web site knows we're not assured of compatibility, and we could end up with a split.”

“Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information.”

“Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.”

“One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn't have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.”

“I suppose it's amazing when you think how many things people get involved in that don't work.”

“The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.”

“The people who designed the tools that make the Net run had their own ideas for the future.”

“One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That's kind of important to me, and that's also kind of important to the whole future of the internet... obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.”

“If you are not on the web, you will have problems accessing services.”

“In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.”

“It was really hard explaining the Web before people just got used to it because they didn't even have words like click and jump and page.”

“The world's urban poor and the illiterate are going to be increasingly disadvantaged and are in danger of being left behind. The web has added a new dimension to the gap between the first world and the developing world. We have to start talking about a human right to connect.”

“There was a time when people felt the internet was another world, but now people realise it's a tool that we use in this world.”

“I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.”

“Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.”

“Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.”

“I don't mind being, in the public context, referred to as the inventor of the World Wide Web. What I like is that image to be separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.”

“Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.”

“The Google algorithm was a significant development. I've had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.”