I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books.

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.

If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%!

To be a hacker - when I use the term - is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.

Freedom of connection with any application to any party is the fundamental social basis of the internet. And now, is the basis of the society built on the internet.

In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.

We need to look at the whole society and think, "Are we actually thinking about what we're doing as we go forward, and are we preserving the really important values that we have in society? Are we keeping it democratic, and open, and so on?"