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CERN releases the World Wide Web into the public domain

30 April 1993·Science, technology & invention·Switzerland·
30 April 1993Date
Science, technology & inventionCategory
2Empires active
Date
30 April 1993
Category
Science, technology & invention
Region
Switzerland
Era
Contemporary
Significance

On 30 April 1993 the European physics laboratory CERN, at the urging of the Web's inventor Tim Berners-Lee, signed a declaration placing the World Wide Web's underlying software and protocols into the public domain, making the technology freely usable by anyone without licensing fees.

Berners-Lee had developed the Web at CERN in 1989-1991, combining hypertext, the HTTP protocol, URLs and HTML to link documents across the internet. The decision to forgo royalties was pivotal: it removed barriers to adoption and allowed the Web to spread without commercial gatekeepers. The same year the graphical Mosaic browser, developed at the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications, made the Web accessible to non-technical users by displaying images alongside text. Within months the number of Web servers grew from a handful into the hundreds, and Web traffic began to climb steeply. The public release laid the technical and legal foundation for the explosive growth of the internet economy, e-commerce, search engines and social media that followed over the next two decades, transforming global communication, commerce and culture.

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