There was a time when the community that was on the Net was homogenous and civilized. Now it's not. We're in the middle of chaos. It may calm down. But the alternative is that there's a total meltdown of the system and that it becomes unusable. That would be a catastrophe.

To me, the biggest surprise is that Google still functions despite the explosion in the number of sites.

We mustn't forget we chose the name 'WWW' before there was even one line of code written. We could do that because the Internet as an infrastructure was already there.

The Web is actually a coming together of three technologies, if you like: the hypertext, the personal computer, and the network. So, the network we had, and the personal computers were there, but people didn't use them, because they didn't know what to use them for, except maybe for a few games.

If I sign up for Facebook and want my account destroyed, it is impossible. They keep tabs on you; there will always be a trace.

At one point, CERN was toying with patenting the World Wide Web.

The forced influence of advertising has given us completely useless TV. You don't want that on the Net. But most on-line information providers need to attract advertising - which slows download times and clutters the screen with windows.