Aging & Wisdom Quote by Tim Berners-Lee

Markets love to preach openness right up until the moment it threatens their margins. Tim Berners-Lee’s line cuts through that hypocrisy with an engineer’s clarity: if you want the web economy to expand, you can’t build its roads as toll lanes. “Royalty-free” isn’t a warm moral preference here; it’s a hard design constraint for scale. A fee on the underlying protocols functions like friction in a system built to reward speed, copying, and network effects. Every paywall at the infrastructure layer becomes a tax on experimentation, a deterrent to small entrants, and an invitation for fragmentation.

The phrasing also does a neat bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu. Berners-Lee doesn’t scold corporations for greed; he credits them with enlightened self-interest. “Most larger companies now see” implies a conversion narrative: even the giants have learned that locking down standards is short-term thinking. That move matters because it frames openness as capitalism’s ally rather than its victim, turning the usual “idealism vs. industry” story inside out.

Context matters: Berners-Lee spent the 1990s and beyond fighting to keep core web standards (HTTP, HTML, URLs) unencumbered, watching contemporaneous battles over proprietary browsers, patented codecs, and “embrace-and-extend” tactics. His subtext is a warning disguised as a compliment: you can monetize on top of the web, but if you monetize the web itself, you choke the very market you’re trying to grow.