A case in point is micropayments. Over coffee and biscuits in London, a more circumspect, even jaded, Berners-Lee now says he regrets that in the early days of the web, no one built a system to enable small, secure payments. Imagine visiting an online news site or streaming service and being able to pay a small fee to read an article or watch a show, with digital tills all linked to a secure online wallet used across the web. That opportunity slipped away long ago, but it would have made today’s web a very different place.

“We looked [at micropayments] early on,” Berners-Lee says, insisting that nothing worked. Besides, he says, if he’d tried charging early users, the web “wouldn’t have taken off.” He wanted to have as big an impact as possible.

Instead businesses gravitated toward advertising. That allowed content to be shown for free, but it also created click-driven incentives that led to exaggeration, misinformation and toxic content. A handful of companies came to dominate this new economy, and more than three decades later, “surfing the web” largely means spending time on sites owned by Meta, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc.

Berners-Lee preferred to avoid too much structure, noting that his father would tell him chaos was a symptom of real life. “You have to be able to capture chaos,” Berners-Lee tells me. “You can’t have a system which is very rigid and can only capture tables and things with rows and columns.”

Ultimately, though, the web needed a smarter financial structure to ensure fairness. In a parallel universe somewhere, Berners-Lee probably did manage to set up micropayments for the web, and the people living in that universe are better for it.

In the end, money was the critical architecture that underpinned the web. From targeted ads to the infinite scroll, its most successful revenue models have led to dependency and promoted outrage.

The age of AI threatens to replay the same hits. Tech leaders like Altman and Google DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis often wax vaguely about a utopian future in which so-called artificial general intelligence cures cancer, ends climate change and solves all manner of intractable human problems. Those promises sound much like the “new era of human creativity” that the starry-eyed Berners-Lee talked excitedly about when he was building the web at CERN. But they’ll ring hollow if OpenAI, Google and others fund their AI services with ads. ChatGPT and Sora certainly look primed to go in that direction.

Clegg and Berners-Lee have much to share. But it’s worth listening to newer, radical voices addressing the economic power imbalance of the web. Some are building alternative business models at scale: Substack and Patreon have shown that direct payment between creators and audiences can support thousands of writers without advertising; Wikipedia shows that nonprofit models can still operate one of the world’s most visited sites.

“Younger people forget what the early web used to be,” Graber says. “You could customize MySpace, websites, and you could have a blog.” Now just a few large companies determine everything you see online, she adds. “That’s what makes it hard to build.”