If you are not on the web, you will have problems accessing services.
The Domain Name Server (DNS) is the Achilles heel of the Web. The important thing is that it's managed responsibly.
It was never clear that it wouldn't just stop (the WWW). Any time during that exponential growth, it could have stalled. I think we were never very confident until 1993.
I should be able to pick which applications I use for managing my life, I should be able to pick which content I look at, and I should be able to pick which device I use, which company I use for supplying my internet, and I'd like those to be independent choices.
Web applications will become more and more ubiquitous throughout our human environment, with walls, automobile dashboards, refrigerator doors all serving as displays giving us a window onto the Web.
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.
Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.
It was the academic community who wired up their universities so it was put together by smart, well-meaning people who thought it was a good idea.
The Web took off in all its glory because it was a royalty-free infrastructure . . . When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going to end in the U.S.A. If we had a situation in which the U.S. had serious flaws in its Net Neutrality, and Europe did have Net Neutrality, and I were trying to start a company, then I would be very tempted to move.
I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways. So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.
There are converging web-related issues cropping up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine as a whole - until now.
I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years.
It's mine - you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I'm getting in return.
What I do has to be a function of what I can do, not a function of what people ask me to do.
I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions.
I'm very aware there are lots of other people who are just bright and working just as hard, with just the same dedication to make the world a good place.
It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.
The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I'll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you're not worrying so much about the underlying syntax.
E-mail is interesting. We can't live with it, and you can't live without it.
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.
What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web … Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.
I'm an optimist about humanity in general, I suppose.
I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.
The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.
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.
